To your health.

January 9, the day we put the final touches to this issue of The Progressive before sending it to the printers, was also this magazine's eighty-fifth anniversary. Volume 1, Number 1 of La Follette's Weekly, as The Progressive was then called, bore the cover date of January 9, 1909. The magazine became The Progressive in January 1928, and switched to monthly publication in January 1948.

I've noted the magazine's anniversaries in this space from time to time--most recently in the February 1989 issue, when The Progressive was a mere eighty years old. On such occasions, I've usually gone back to Volume 1, Number 1, to quote from the introductory statement of purpose by the magazine's founding editor, Robert M. La Follette Sr. This year I thought I'd do something different, so I reached for the February 1949 issue--published forty-five years ago this month and forty years after the magazine's founding. I was hoping to find something that might have a bearing on today's concerns. I did.

The lead article, by a long-since departed Democratic Senator from Montana named James E. Murray, was billed on the front cover with the line, NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE, Now! Inside the magazine, Senator Murray's article was headed, To YOUR GOOD HEALTH! An editor's note pointed out that Murray had "pioneered in Congress for the enactment of national health legislation," and added: "His [bill] has been kicked around up to now by both Democratic and Republican Congresses, but the measure ... this year is regarded to have a much better chance than its predecessors." Unfortunately, in that season of postwar optimism, The Progressive had a somewhat clouded crystal ball.

Murray's article deplored the fact that 325,000 Americans would die in 1949 "because they can't afford to live ... because these 325,000 men, women, and children cannot afford to buy urgently needed health and medical services in time."

His proposed solution was to broaden the Social Security system to include universal prepaid health coverage, "guaranteeing both availability of care to all who need it and adequate payments to doctors, hospitals, and others who supply the services." It was, in other words, what we would today call a single-payer plan.

Murray addressed all of the familiar arguments--familiar then, familiar now--against a national health-care program: that it would amount to "socialized medicine," that it would disrupt the sacred doctor-patient relationship, that it would cost too much. He took note of "the very cunning, insidious, and extremely expensive propaganda campaign" being waged by the medical establishment against health-care reform.

"The passage of this measure would be of great consequence," he wrote. "A fear would be lifted from millions of our people--the fear that their pocketbooks will not be able to stand the costs of going to a doctor or a hospital.

"This fear is widespread among middle-income groups as well as among lower-income working people and small farmers. With National Health Insurance, the dread of the unpredictable cost of illness or accident would be lifted from American families, many thousands of lives would be saved, suffering alleviated, and waste greatly reduced."

Murray's article was, of course, neither the first in The Progressive to call for a national health-care overhaul nor the last. In May 1959, for example, Selig Greenberg wrote about "mounting public pressure for full health-insurance coverage, without exclusions and loopholes." In December 1969, I wrote from Washington that "battle lines are being drawn for another fight to establish in the United States a right that every other advanced nation has guaranteed its citizens for decades--the right to medical care." To put it gently, I was a bit premature.

If we're lucky, it may turn out that Senator Murray and the 1949 Progressive were only half a century or so ahead of time--confirming what La Follette wrote in Volume 1, Number 1, back in 1909: "Engrossed in material development, we have neglected all our institutions."

Three times this year and, we hope, in years to come The Progressive will publish an expanded magazine, devoting the added pages to a larger Books section. This increase is made possible by a generous gift from Jane Logue of Kent, Ohio, who specified that it be applied to a project we might not otherwise be able to undertake, particularly in the area of literature.

Mrs. Logue's contribution was made in memory of her late husband, Joseph Morgan Logue, a long-time subscriber and devoted supporter of The Progressive. We are most grateful.