The proposal, reported in the Press Herald Aug. 8, to designate the Frances Perkins home in Newcastle a national monument, would honor a truly great American, the architect of the great labor reforms of the New Deal. Less well known – because they were unsuccessful – are Perkins’s valiant efforts to establish national health insurance.

In every generation, going back more than a century to Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Era, there have been serious proposals to institute some form of universal health care in America. Despite their popularity, they have always been thwarted by special interests, most prominently the American Medical Association, one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying forces. It would be natural to assume that the AMA must hold the public’s health and well-being to be its paramount interest, but this has not always been demonstrated in its behavior over the years.

Nevertheless, there is hope. The AMA, under pressure from its student membership, may be softening its opposition. And, of great significance, the Maine Medical Association last year released a major policy statement urging “federal health care reform that provides universal coverage through either an adequately funded single-payer system or a combination of private and public financing where the federal government has, at minimum, regulatory powers over health care delivery to protect consumers and providers from private profit-driven motives.”

We can be proud of our doctors here in Maine for their leadership on an issue so important to all of us. Frances Perkins would be very pleased.

Michael Bacon
Westbrook