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A WARRIOR FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH INSURANCE
(Abstracted from an article by Bill Clements in the Chicago Tribune Magazine)

Doctor Ida Hellander, the Executive Director of Physicians for a National Health Program e-mailed us an article about Doctor Quentin Young which was featured in a lengthy cover article in the Chicago Tribune Magazine (Sunday, December 9, 2001). We found this story so heartening and inspirational that we wanted to share some highlights with the readers of Health Care Matters.

Bill Clements, the author, called his story "The Patient Doctor" and began with the statement that "His longtime cause--national health care--is on life support, but Quentin Young has a chronic case of optimism...

"If the adage is true--that it's not how people get along when they agree, but how they get along when they don't--then Dr. Quentin Young must be judged a success. Both his friends and foes, and you can't always tell them apart, say Young is easy to disagree with but very hard to dislike.

"Which is doubtless a good thing for Young, now 78, because he loves to argue and has chosen the unpopular, anti-authoritarian, progressive side of just about every issue to come down the pike during the last 65 years, be it racial equity, the Vietnam War (or any war for that matter, including the current one in Afghanistan) or national health insurance.

"'It's true,' Young says with his self-admitted immodesty, 'that over the years I've aligned myself with unpopular causes, but over time they've become the majority opinions.'

"In 1964, he co-founded the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group of progressive physicians who provided medical care at civil rights marches and sit-ins and riots. That role earned Young a prestigious position in the civil rights movement: He was Martin Luther King Jr.'s doctor when King lived in Chicago in 1966. His committee affiliation also got Young subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1968 to answer questions about his and the medical committee's role during the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year--an experience friends say was a high point of Young's career because he believed he got the best of verbal sparring with committee members.

"Even now, nearing his 80th year, Young cannot keep still. 'I am impulsively an advocate,' he says. In addition to running an internal medicine practice in his native Hyde Park--as he has done since 1952--the indefatigable doctor is medical commentator for National Public

Radio on WBEZ-FM and helps direct two organizations he founded to advocate for national health care (often referred to by critics as socialized medicine): Physicians for a National Health Program and the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group.

"Despite the long odds against any national health-care reform in a closely divided Congress, Young is optimistic about national health insurance being enacted, even after the war on terrorism put many domestic issues on the back burner. 'I think very emphatically that the complications of Sept. 11 create a much more urgent need for national health insurance,' he says. 'Our current system is imploding. Even with our straitened circumstances economically, because of the incredible administrative waste in the present system, there's still enough money there to take care of everybody.'

"The movement for universal coverage has adopted a slogan that Young came up with: 'Everybody in, nobody out.' Which pretty much sums up the way Young feels about nearly everything.

"Taking the long view is one of the secrets to Young's success, according to U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), a friend who has known him for 35 years dating back to the civil rights struggles of the '60s. 'Quentin's been far more effective than many analysts would give him credit for,' Davis says, 'because he understands something they don't--which is that advocacy, for those who believe, is a lifelong process.' Part of Young's survivability may be the way he can argue his position with absolute tenacity and still remain friends, or at least cordial, with his adversaries. 'In the fullness of time, I have come to understand my opponents' arguments,' Young says. 'Even if I find them hateful, I still respect them. I'm an absolute nut about freedom-of-speech issues.'"

We are proud to call Doctor Young a colleague and a comrade-in-arms.

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