Medicine: Nor Fetters, Nor Shackles

The American Medical Association has damned compulsory health insurance as loudly and insistently as Fair Deal politicians have endorsed it. Last week a third party, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Ox-nam of New York, cried a plague on both houses in the medical dispute.

We want “neither the shackles of the omnicompetent state,” Bishop Oxnam told a meeting of the American Protestant Hospital Association, “nor the fetters of the incompetent A.M.A. Protestants are opposed to bureaucratic dictates of the state, and equally opposed to the reactionary propaganda of the A.M.A.

“There are no better doctors in the world than the American doctor. Let these doctors, in cooperation with men acquainted with our national health needs, work out progressive answers to the problems, rather than pay their assessments to a little oligarchy that has fought advance for a generation.”