Word: egeberg
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...organized system or a haphazard numbers game, there is no doubt whatever that it is racially biased. For most whites, medical attention is only a phone call or a car ride away. By contrast, says the nation's top health officer, Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, "it is the black Americans and other minorities for whom the 'system' works least well." Among blacks, the poor are a majority, and for them inadequate health care-or none-is a womb-to-tomb reality. They...
...health education classes in many public schools. A six-year-old black girl in the South dies of diphtheria because no one ever told her mother that she should have her baby inoculated against the disease-or bothered to make sure that she did it. In fact, says Egeberg, more than 20% of nonwhite children have failed to get the standard shots against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (a combination "DTP" vaccine), while 91.4% of all white children have had them. A boy is deaf in one ear because his mother could not take him to the clinic...
Survival First. Health services are rationed according to purchasing power rather than need, and so are least available to those who need them most. Says Egeberg: "The poor suffer a great deal more infectious disease, go to the hospital more often, and stay there longer"-if they can afford to get to a hospital. As Permon Johnson, a student at Nashville's predominantly black Meharry Medical College, puts it: "The average poor black adult places survival ahead of medical attention. He comes to the hospital only when he's on his last legs. He doesn't know...
...fault, according to the subcommittee, is the lack of a national health policy to provide form and direction to federal health programs. Under the current setup, even HEW's Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, the nation's top health officer, has effective control over only 22% of his department's budget. To consolidate health programs, the subcommittee has called for a council of health advisers similar to the agencies now dealing with economic and environmental matters...
...Egeberg proposed a radical solution, involving nothing less than a change in prevailing attitudes about marriage and children. The notion that everyone should marry and raise a family was important in an era when infant-mortality rates were high and life expectancy short. Now it is important, he warned, to remove the stigma that society attaches to remaining unmarried and to somehow change the feelings of comfort and security that many Americans derive from having large families. "This is going to shock a lot of people," he conceded, "but we have to get the discussion started...