fits are largest to the most highly paid. Coverage is still in-
complete and eligibility rules are complicated.

Need knows no rules of eligibility or coverage. Protection
against old age, illness and economic misfortune must be a
right for everyone. A right each has earned through paying
for all the social insurances in accordance with his ability. Bene-
fits must be adequate to provide a minimum sustenance in
health and decency, regardless of a man's previous earnings.
This is important not alone to the individual, but to assure the
relative stability of our consumer industries and agricultural
production and the well being of our whole society.

Complete medical care should be available to all. But any
plan adopted today should be sufficiently flexible to allow for
experimentation and growth, and in any program of public
medicine the value of the practicing physician's relationship
to his patient must be recognized. Adequate provision must be
made for building facilities where none now exists, for develop-
ing health and diagnostic centers, and for funds for research
and medical education.

Another form of insurance that is of outstanding importance
for the relatively stable functioning of our free economy is an
adequate and uniform system of federal unemployment in-
surance. Today, we have fifty-one separate laws governing un-
employment compensation. Our economy is too interdependent
to allow this division of responsibility to continue. The present
tax collection machinery, federal for some insurances, state for
others, with duplication of records, is wasteful, costly and time-
consuming. And benefit rates vary widely and are inadequate.

The post-war reconversion strain will fall unevenly on the
states. In this crucial period we shall need the stabilizing influ-
ence of uniform standards and procedures, and of adequate
benefits fixed, not according to former wages, but on the basis
of a regional cost of living, to cover bare necessities.

For a long time our society left the education of children to
the individual parents' ability to pay. Then it made a decision
which changed civilization. It decided that all children should
be educated, regardless of their parents' income.

We are now faced with another decision as logical and as

-10-