Financing Medical Care: An Appraisal of Foreign Programs

The political controversy over federally dispensed medical care has generated both an enormous published literature and countless millions of unrecorded spoken words. The transcript of the hearings before the House Ways and Means Committee of the 87th Congress comprises 4 volumes, totalling nearly 2,300 printed pages. Books, pamphlets, articles, and editorials in newspapers and magazines, documentaries and debates on television have combined to a total verbiage that has long since surpassed the previous recordholder, the "Prohibition Question," that culminated in the late unlamented Volstead Act of 1919 to 1933. It took 14 years to correct that monumental moralistic legislative blunder, yet public memory is so short that we are brashly sailing ever closer to an even more perilous shoal, driven by a wind of words that approaches gale force. So noisy is the wind, and so exhilarating is the headlong surge of the ship, that attention has been diverted from