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Notable New     Yorkers
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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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insurance is much more taken for granted now, I know it is, especially in New York City.

At any rate the Group Health Insurance organization has done much to be a pacesetter for insurance plans in this area.

Another venture I became involved in about a year later was the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York. This was an entirely different scheme. In the '30s, I had interested David Hyman, the President of the New York Foundation, in the fact that medical care was not available adequately to vast numbers of people in this country, and he had decided to try to get New York City as a city corporation to do something about this. He had interested La Guardia and George Baer in taking action.

(It's curious that I interested Mr. Hyman in the need for medical care, and he interested me and consolidated in my mind the importance of medical research, so that between the two of us we sort of transferred our roles. He became deeply involved in the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, and I became deeply involved the rest of my life in the promotion of medical research. Isn't that extraordinary?)

Q:

That's interesting. You've indicated that at various times you had an interest in medical research, but this was giving it a real impact.

Lasker:

Yes, he gave me a real impact and he was the only other layman I knew that was deeply interested in medicine and





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