Draft Doctors

HARVARD Medical School Dean Robert H. Ebert has hopes of balancing the budget this year at the cost of committing his students to stints of national service in "needy areas." Ebert says that the Med School will gain one million dollars in federal funds if Congress passes health manpower legislation that would give a contracting medical school from $2100 to $3000 per student per year.

The figures are big, but, from the medical school's point of view, so are the restrictions: the measure would force medical students to spend up to four years in remote or needy areas, and would affect the curriculum and increase the size of the medical school.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) would expose medical school graduates to a draft by lottery, to serve in the National Health Service Corps in doctor poor areas. The aim of his legislation is to contrive a degree of nationalization of American medical resources. It would also establish the principle that the skill of medical treatment carries with its practice a debt to the people who need such treatment. The bill should go further, however, and require such service of all emerging physicians.

Some doctors in the gray Medical School buildings on Longwood Avenue are already saying that such government interference threatens academic freedom, but such high-faulting principals don't mean much when the government displays more responsibility for people's rights than a private institution does. It is better that Harvard is beholden to the government under contract than to a large corporation. Monsanto, for example--which does not have a legal pretense to representing the interests of poor people.

Ebert, in his support for the measure, seems more concerned about money than poor people. But this legislation in its progressive assumption that treatment is a right, is commendable ad Harvard should continue to back it.