To your health.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: 85th anniversary of 'The Progressive'; health care reform history - Editorial

January 9, the day we put the final touches to this issue of The Progressive before sending it to the printers, was also this magazine's eighty-fifth anniversary. Volume 1, Number 1 of La Follette's Weekly, as The Progressive was then called, bore the cover date of January 9, 1909. The magazine became The Progressive in January 1928, and switched to monthly publication in January 1948.

I've noted the magazine's anniversaries in this space from time to time--most recently in the February 1989 issue, when The Progressive was a mere eighty years old. On such occasions, I've usually gone back to Volume 1, Number 1, to quote from the introductory statement of purpose by the magazine's founding editor, Robert M. La Follette Sr. This year I thought I'd do something different, so I reached for the February 1949 issue--published forty-five years ago this month and forty years after the magazine's founding. I was hoping to find something that might have a bearing on today's concerns. I did.

The lead article, by a long-since departed Democratic Senator from Montana named James E. Murray, was billed on the front cover with the line, NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE, Now! Inside the magazine, Senator Murray's article was headed, To YOUR GOOD HEALTH! An editor's note pointed out that Murray had "pioneered in Congress for the enactment of national health legislation," and added: "His [bill] has been kicked around up to now by both Democratic and Republican Congresses, but the measure ... this year is regarded to have a much better chance than its predecessors." Unfortunately, in that season of postwar optimism, The Progressive had a somewhat clouded crystal ball.

Murray's article deplored the fact that 325,000 Americans would die in 1949 "because they can't afford to live ... because these 325,000 men, women, and children cannot afford to buy urgently needed health and medical services in time."

His proposed solution was to broaden the Social Security system to include universal prepaid health coverage, "guaranteeing both availability of care to all who need it and adequate payments to doctors, hospitals, and others who supply the services." It was, in other words, what we would today call a single-payer plan.

Murray addressed all of the familiar arguments--familiar then, familiar now--against a national health-care program: that it would amount to "socialized medicine," that it would disrupt the sacred doctor-patient relationship, that it would cost too much...