Report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1740277147

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-132094

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Stationery Office

Year of publication:: 1926

Scope:: XII, 394 S.

Digitisation:: 2020

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter X. Proposals for extending medical benefit

Collection:: Economics Books

rds Nne- ge (., 1de hat .Ct- her by ad, ere ay, 1to is a he ad 0 t poe) at ml. nt hy ce Z. n= 1- ns at nd ve ne oh ‘nn at ly y ar Le n- it +1 11 jw UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 139 know he does not really belong to that breed—always come here com- plaining that they can not get State action for their reforms; that it is hopeless, and that is why they come to Congress. [ wonder if they ever stop to think of the reason why they can not get State action? When organizations come here to Washington. for ‘egislation the people are frequently unknown. They come from the ands of the country. You do not learn anything until you are told and then you elicit it with considerable difficulty, who they are, what sheir antecedents are. and vou have to puzzle out for yourselves their motives. When the people of a State go to their State capital they are not unknown. The legislators, or a large number of them, know all about them. They may know them personslly, They know why they are coming. They know what they have got under their chest and also, if it is an important measure, they take some interest in considering how it is going to affect their people, the people in their county or in their ward, when they go back home, and they make it their business to find out, or the newspapers make it their business to spread that vefore the public. The whole thing is pretty thoroughly gone into and exposed. If it is a good thing, it is passed. In some cases a foolish thing and, in many cases, a foolish measure may get through in a cer- tain State. But 1t does not come up in other States all at the same time, and in the course of a year or two it is demonstrated to anybody who cares to look that it is foolish, ineffective, or absurd, and conse- quently it is dropped and we do not hear of it again. It may be re- pealed or it may pass into the condition that Grover Cleveland called nnocuous desuetude. But they come here to Washington and ask you to enact for the first time something that they admit by their own showing they can aot get through their own States for the reason that State legislatures, with full knowledge of the people behind it and the local conditions confronting them and of the precise merits or demerits of the bill, have good reason to turn down. . Of course, it is easier to deal with one body than it is with 48. That is the very reason why we should insist upon maintaining the funda- mentals of the American Constitution. What are those fundamentals? It is very easy to speak of them, but [ believe that there is one thing that is definitely opposed to the funda~ mentals of our Constitution, and that is uniformity by compulsion. Uniformity in certain things as provided for by the United States Constitution are all right; such as a uniform bankruptcy law, a aniform procedure and method of naturalizing aliens, one or two things of that kind that by their very nature may or should be uniform in order to accomplish the results desired; but the fathers, the framers of that instrument, were far wiser than even our own distinguished generation in leaving a great flexibility in all other matters and pro- viding specifically, as far as language could make it plain, that there was to be no uniformity in regard to local government in this country, but that the local responsibility for governing yourselves was left to the American citizen in his own community, where he lived and where he knew his neighbors and was known by them. . That is the reason that our organization opposes this measure. It is a measure to compel the adoption throughout these United States of a single rather hastily gotten up measure. I say rather hastily,

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