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Show 6 THE SEARCHLIGHT Economic Safety Requires Unified Social Insurance Early action to prepare for the war-end situation on the home front, when many people will be hunting work, is the urgent recommendation of the Social Security Board in its eighth annual report to Congress. “No one can doubt”, says the report, “that victory will bring sharp and sudden changes in all the factors in American life with which the social security program is concerned. Whether that time comes sooner or later, it is now none too soon to design and implement the social security provisions which will be needed then. We should provide full insurance protection.” The Board recommends immediate action to provide insurance against the loss or interruption of wages for any of the common causes that threaten the livelihood of working people and are beyond the individual’s control; in short, a com- prehensive program of insurance protection which would provide benefit payments in part-compensation for wages lost on account of sickness or disability, temporary or permanent, as well as on account of unemployment, old age, and death. Would Extend Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Specifically as to old age and survivors insurance, the Board recommends extension of cover- age to the millions of workers not now covered as the most fundamental and immediate need—especially coverage for agricultural workers, domestic workers in private homes, employees of non-profit organizations and self-employed persons. A still more immediate problem arises from the situation of millions of persons now in the armed forces. Because of the eligibility provisions and the method of computing the benefits under the law as it stands, the insurance protection which servicemen and women may have acquired before their induction will be partly or wholly lost, and the amount of potential benefits payable to them or their survivors will diminish. The Board’s recommendations would protect these rights and provide for additional wage credits based on military service. Would Provide Disability and Health Insurance The Board recommends that insurance against permanent total disability be incorporated in the Federal system of old-age and survivors insurance, and also that cash benefits, to compensate in part for wages lost through temporary disability, be coordinated with the provisions for permanent disability. It is the Board’s belief, further, that ‘comprehensive measures can and should be un dertaken to distribute medical costs and assure access to services of hospitals, physicians, laboratories, and the like to all who have need of them. For all groups ordinarily self-supporting, such a step would mean primarily a redistribution of existing costs through insurance devices. It should be effected in such a way as to preserve free choice of doctor or hospital and personal relationships between physicians and their patients, to maintain professional leadership to insure adequate remuneration—very probably, more nearly adequate than that in customary circumstances—to all practitioners and institutions furnishing medical and health services, and to guarantee the continued independence of non-governmental hospitals.” Would Make Unemployment Insurance National As to unemployment insurance, the Board sums up the experience of the country under the present State-Federal system, with its 51 separate and independent State and Territorial laws, and comes to the conclusion that “administration of unemployment insurance should be made a Federal responsibility in order to gear unemployment compensation effectively into a comprehensive national system of social security.” Only Nation- wide measures to counter unemployment can be effective, the Board believes, when the need arises for swift and concerted action to harmonize activities with national policy during the changeover of our economic system to peace. But even if the special stresses of post-war years were not impending, the State-Federal basis would have called for reconsideration by now, in the Board’s opinion. This is fundamentally because “the course of events since Pearl Harbor has emphasized what had become increasingly evi(Continued on following page) |