Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Mary LaskerMary Lasker
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

choice of doctors to everybody.

Around this time I started looking a round to see if I could find any individuals who were interested in the promotion of this idea. The only one I found was Dr. Michael Davis, who at the time was chairman of the Committee on Medical Economics, supported largely if not entirely by the Roosevelt Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Davis was deeply committed to the idea of national health insurance but very pedantic about it. He knew a great deal about health plans in other countries but was in no real sense a propagandist himself. However, he was the only person that I knew who was well informed and had a determination to do something in the area.

I helped him to form a committee called the Committee for the Nation's Health, which was to further in every possible way the idea of national health insurance to aid people in meeting the devastating costs of severe illness and to prevent it through the ability to have checkups and medical care before the illnesses became too severe.

Q:

You were to supply the ideas of how to publicize this. . .

Lasker:

And the money. He had no money, except the money that he had been getting from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Roosevelt Foundation, and this was really something else.

The Committee was organized around 1943 or '44, and





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help