LITTLE ROCK — Now comes a clarification on the previous reference to Arkansas’ “failure” rate during World War II.
Reader Perry Kuntz says that a high number of draftees failed their physical, the primary causes being pellagra, poor vision and bad teeth.
Kuntz first wrote to say he’d read that during the war Arkansas was second only to South Carolina in its failure rate.
A little bit of research still hasn’t confirmed that ranking, but I did come across an interesting tidbit at the Truman Library website leading me to explore the topic a little further. Interesting to some of us who were only babies when Harry S. Truman was president, that is.
There’s some disagreement over whether Theodore Roosevelt or Truman was the first president to endorse national health insurance, but Truman was the first president toactually propose a national health insurance program, the impetus being his alarm at the number of draftees who had failed their induction physicals during WWII because of untreated medical conditions.
In November 1945, only seven months into his presidency, Truman proposedsuch a program. In his message to Congress, he argued that the federal government should play a role in health care, saying, “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility.”
One of his aims was to ensure that all communities, regardless of size or income level, had access to doctors and hospitals. He emphasized the urgent need for such measures, saying that “about 1,200 counties, 40 percent of the total in the country, with some 15 million people, have either no local hospital or none that meets even the minimum standards of national professional associations.”
Truman called for the creation of a national health insurance fund to be run by the federal government, open to all Americans but strictly optional.
“Participants would pay monthly fees into the plan, which would cover the cost of any and all medical expenses that arose in a time of need. The government would pay for the cost of services rendered by any doctor who chose to join the program. In addition, the insurance plan would give a cash balance to the policy holder to replace wages lost due to illness or injury.”
He wasn’t successful; the American Medical Association quickly branded it “socialized medicine,” the key word being “socialized,” anathema in post-WWII America.
However, he raised the profile of health care needs throughout the nation, and during his presidency, and 20 years later, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law at Truman Library (with a pen handed to him by the elderly Truman), he declared that it “all started really with the man from Independence.”
Truman and his wife, Bess, became the program’s first enrollees.
“They told me, President Truman, that if you wish to get the voluntary medical insurance you will have to sign this application form, and they asked me to sign as your witness,”Johnson reportedly told the former president. “You’re getting special treatment, since cards won’t go out to the other folks until the end of this month-but we wanted you to know, and we wanted the whole world to know, who is the real daddy of Medicare.”
More information on thephysical condition of draft-age men leading u to and during WWII can be found online at the U.S. Medical Department’s Office of Medical History website. One last tidbit: The results of dental exams were so alarming in the run-up to the European war that the military set the minimum dental requirements at a total of six masticating teeth and six incisor teeth properly opposed.
“As soon as the first statistics were available, it was discovered that failure to meet these requirements had resulted in rejection of approximately 9 percent of those examined. If that standard had been maintained, it has been estimated that by the end of 1943 nearly 1 million men who were inducted under the liberalized dental standards would have been lost to the service. Dental requirements were revised downward, and an extensive reparative program by the Dental Corps initiated, until in October 1942 a man completely edentulous”-i.e., toothless-“could be inducted if his condition was corrected or correctable by dentures.” The requirements for acceptance for military service are quite a bit higher now, but then, so is our dental health (and general well-being), for which I suppose we owe at least a tip of the hat to Harry.
Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 03/11/2011