Hobby, Salk and the health care debate

 

            Oveta Culp Hobby is unknown to most people today, but she stands as an unwitting symbol of this nation’s rather complicated embrace with government-funded social programs that many Americans mistakenly refer to as socialism.  

In 1955, following severe polio outbreaks, Hobby, as the cabinet secretary to Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s newly created Department of Health, Education and Welfare, legalized the first polio vaccine.

            Two things about this are interesting: Eisenhower entered office to stop what he described as “creeping socialism” from social programs – such as Social Security – that were created under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

            Yet, Eisenhower went on to expand those programs in order to serve more people, and Hobby, who apparently opposed government administered health programs, approved the distribution of a vaccine in a national mass inoculation program.

            The program was necessary, if not life-saving. Three years prior to its approval polio outbreaks had increased dramatically from the average 20,000 per year to nearly 60,000 and 35,000 in ’52 and ’53, respectively. An alarmed public demanded action.

            Private industry toiled away on finding a vaccine, spending millions of dollars and predicting it would be years before an effective vaccine would be available.

            However, Jonas Salk developed a test-proven vaccine in 1952, for which he declined to seek a patent that would have reaped a fortune for him. “There is no patent,” he reportedly told a newsman. “Could you patent the sun?”

Salk devoted seven years researching the vaccine, which historian William O’Neill described as “the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.” More than 1.8 million school children took part in the trial.

            Salk’s work took place at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, under the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Founded in 1938 by President Roosevelt – himself a victim of polio – it was funded through public appeal to give a dime and support research for polio’s eradication.

The organization later became known as The March of Dimes.

            While Hobby may have been a mere instrument in a tax-payer supported program to improve and ensure the health of the public, Salk and his views embodied the spirit of what those programs really mean to a democracy as wealthy and capable as ours.

            Which brings us to today’s health care debate. For all the sound and fury about government intrusion and costs, even some ardent liberals have missed the point.

If you listen to what people who support universal access to health care are saying – and this includes people without insurance and even those with limited coverage – and if you go back to the roots of this debate that began in the 1930s, you will find the health care debate, first and foremost, is not about containing costs.

It’s about equality and rights. It’s about ensuring that everyone has access to the same quality of health care as our elected officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Yes, containing costs is an important element, and it is not as difficult as the health care industry and some politicians would like us to believe, but the real question is this:

Why provide elected officials and government workers optimum health care at the expense of taxpayers, yet many, if not most of those taxpayers must settle for less, and in many cases, far less coverage because they can’t afford to pay for it?

This question goes to the heart of who we are as a country. The social programs that emerged in the ‘30s were designed not to grab a chunk of the free market or ideologically enslave people as critics argue, but simply to help people.

It’s the same reasoning for government-funded – not government-run – health care. Wouldn’t an insurance pool of 300 million Americans drive down costs?

The present arrangement drives up costs and seems to neither promote domestic tranquility nor the general welfare. Where is the equality we supposedly are trying to build this country on that was stated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed … .”

In the health care debate we have to decide whether health care is a certain unalienable right or whether we want to pay the extreme costs in life and money for patenting the sun.