Democrat and Chronicle from Rochester, New York • Page 102

NOW 2 EditorialsColumns ROCHESTER, N. SUNDAY, JANUARY 20, 1S72 Editorials I tag Should Welfare Be Taken Over By Uncle Sam? Photo Editorial Freedom Starts Flood of Tears The emotional meeting shown in this photograph from Tel Aviv took place when a Soviet Jewish woman was reunited with a relative at the Tel Aviv airport. She was one of 326 Soviet Jews who arrived that day aboard a Jumbo jet. Day after day, week after week, for many months now, Soviet Jews have been arriving on Israeli soil. Years of pressure to "Let My People Go" are having results.

After years of keeping it tightly locked, Soviet authorities have suddenly thrown open the freedom door. Some see it as a move to subject the Israeli economy and society to heavy new stresses. But as one correspondent has said, "In the long run, these considerations pale before the epic fact of emancipation for Soviet Zionists, the enrichment of Israeli society with a treasured new source of immigration." -Jf I Jc, I-' 1 I i 'No-Fault' Insurance Now Up to Congress Clayton Fritchey The Nixon Administration is paying lip service to the bill, but in practice it favors the adoption of the no-fault system on a state-by-state basis, which means putting it off for many years to come. A lawyers' lobby and some of th, insurance companies will, of course, try to block congressional action, but they don't have the clout on Capitol Hill that they have in the more susceptible state legislatures. In any event, if the public wakes up to no-fault and demands it, it will go through.

The federal bill not only insures all 'drivers for bodily injury but for all property damage as. well. Policies must be sold to any licensed driver, rather than just preferred risks, and they cannot be canceled or nonrenewed unless the driver loses his license or fails to pay the premiums. The Massachusetts law provides for automatic settlement of claims up to $2,000, but the federal bill goes far beyond that. Besides 100 per cent reimbursement for medical and rehabilitation expenses, it also makes up for lost take-home pay up to $1,000 a month for as long as 30 months.

Further, benefits wouid be paid for loss of future earnings through permanent partial disability. The bill is so broad that an injured housewife's hired replacement housekeeper would be paid in full. Even injured pedestrians who had no auto insurance wolud also be paid in full. Policyholders if dissatisfied over a settlement, could sue, with the insurance company required to pay the legal costs, win br lose. Pennsylvania's insurance commissioner says: "No-fault auto insurance is a politician's dream because it can make virtually everyone better off while economically injuring only a small group of trial lawyers, ambulance chasers and insurance companies not prepared for competitive change." Sen.

Hart agrees and adds, "Let's vote on it." WASHINGTON For tens of millions of American car owners, there is no greater headache than the rising cost of auto insurance, to say nothing of its limited availability. But help is on the way, spurred by the amazing firstyear success of Massachusetts' pioneering "no-fault" insurance law. Considering the potential benefits of this revolutionary reform, it is astounding how many Americans are still not familiar with the no-fault system of protection. Briefly, it requires insurance companies to pay accident victims promptly regardless of who was to blame. It abolishes the expense and delay, of litigation and long drawn-out settlements.

The principle is much the same as that in fire and health insurance where benefits are paid not on the basis of fault but on actual loss. Because it impairs the income of thousands of lawyers who hold key positions in the various state legislatures, the development of the no-fault idea has been so effectively throttled that, up till Jan. 1, Massachusetts was the only state able to put the plan into operation. Gov. Francis Sargent recently informed his fellow governors that in the first six months of 1971 the plan had already saved drivers in his state $76 million in premium costs.

And that is only the beginning. The Massachusetts law, which began by covering only bodily injury, was launched a year ago with a mandatory 15 per cent reduction in premium costs. Since than another cut of 27.6 per cent was ordered retroactively, and that has been topped by a second 27.6 per cent reduction ordered for 1972. Under the no-fault system, the insuring company pays the policyholder for his own loss instead of protecting him against claims made for losses he may cause to others. In the latter In his Jan.

18 message to the State Legislature, Gov. Rockefeller emphasized that "any citizen truly in need should be able to get a basic standard level of assistance sufficient to meet human necessities, regardless of where that person lives Yet, ironically, until recently, this was not true of a citizen in need who had not lived in New York State for a year. Under the state's welfare residency statute, enacted last May, he was denied ANY aid under the State Social Services Department. That's no longer so. On Jan.

24 the U.S. Supreme Court, as in 1969, held the residency requirement for aid unconstitutional. The court did not accept New York State's plea of financial distress as an adequate defense. In effect, the court said that an American citizen cannot be penalized because of where he lives. New York State should abandon this approach.

It is not so easy for state government to overlook the costly situation into which migrating needy people put it. Living in this state are about 12,000 potential recipients who've been here less than a month. Their welfare aid will cost the public about $12 million a year. Monroe County lists 200 a year in that category to welfare rolls. The Supreme Court decision adds a powerful argument for a federal plan assuring a reasonable and uniform level of welfare assistance.

New York State's higher average grants for years have lured migrants from states that pay less. Many officials, Gov. Rockefeller included, see welfare as a national problem. "Welfare imposes a crushing burden on state and local government," said the governor. "Yet welfare has no business being there A' needy family shouldn't be starved out of one state to become a disproportionate responsibility of the people in another state." Gov.

Rockefeller wants a federal takeover of welfare and Medicaid with financing responsibility centered in Washington. He cites the Social Security System under which payments to the retired, elderly, widows and dependent children are computed on a uniform basis throughout the country. Couldn't a similar nationwide approach work in distributing benefits under welfare? The basic philosophical question is how much more local control do we want to surrender? Isn't this an invitation for building up a giant, dominating bureaucracy? Another point: The determination of need is a function involving judgment that is best exercised locally, where the applicants are known. Even this advantage is not absolute; some counties might hold grants to an inhumane low level, defeating the purpose of welfare. Without compassion, welfare is meaningless.

Probably a good answer lies somewhere between extremes. A measure of local control is vital, lest centralized procedures mean administrative tyranny. Yet nationwide standards of aid that are fair everywhere are just as vital. For these, federal muscle, perhaps in the authority to withhold funds, must be available. The inequities borne by some states in shouldering the welfare load and demoralizing inconsistencies among other states are crying for relief through administrative reforms.

Congress should lend an immediate, attentive ear. system, it is necessary to determine fault to decide who will pay for which losses. In the new system, fault is not an issue. The experience of Massachusetts has certified the claims of no-fault advocates that it would stem the rising tide of damage actions that clog the courts, and more nearly provide for a complete restoration of economic loss incurred by accident victims. This month four other states are putting so-called no-fult systems into effect, but with the exception of Florida they are feeble imitations of the Massachusetts plan.

Moreover, as good as the Massachusetts law is, It does not compare with a bill now before Congress which would federalize no-fault insurance on a truly total scale, Everything now center on this bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Philip Hart (D- Sen. Warren Magnuson chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. They are so senior and so respected that anly legislation they support has a good chance of passage. The Commerce Committee is about to begin executive sessions to draft a final bill which ought to reach the Senate floor within a few weeks.

Antics of the Rich Provide Some Relief TFT Smith Hempstone WASHINGTON A fortnight ago, David Frost, a television personality, took some 60 of his friends to Bermuda for lunch. More recently, art dealer Reese Palley defrosted David by flying 737 of his intimate chums to Paris for a weekend. Frost's junket, attended by such luminaries as former Cleveland mayor Carl B. Stokes, chess champ Bobby Fischer, writer James A. Michener and sometime economist John Kenneth Galbraith, probably didn't set him back more than about $12,000 and he can write it off his income tax anyway.

That Frost should wish to stuff his guests and himself with caviar, lobster and veal pojarsky before hurrying off to Bangladesh to interview Sheik Mujibur Rahman, whose people are dying of hunger, is largely a matter of the entertainer's own sense of values and propriety, if any. Palley's party cost an estimated $250,000, including $150,000 for the charter of two Boeing 747s, $50,000 for hotel rooms (guests paid for their own food) and $50,000 for entertainment, all of which would have kept a good many Bengalis in rice for a while. But Palley's trip also is tax-ieductible he's opening a gallery in Paris and, in any event, he regards the whole thing as just "a new way of merchandising." There is, of course, nothing new about the public extravagance of the nouveaux riches or, indeed, of the riches. It is at least arguable that it is no more vulgar to spend $250,000 on flying 737 "intimate" friends to Paris than it it to expend twice that sum, as Henry Ford is once said to have done, to put one's daughter on the marriage market with a debut party. Indeed, it might be argued that the purpose of having money is to spend it and that the manner of disposing of the stuff is less important than the act itself.

It may even be postu- signed to lessen the gap between rich and poor. But there are both loopholes in the law and ways around it which the very rich, with their batteries of lawyers and accountants, find little difficulty in exploiting. Indeed, if the poor are always with us, so too are the rich. Being fewer, they are, with the exception of the Frosts and the Palleys, just less conspicuous. The wit of man has yet to produce a political or economic system free of disparities.

The Soviet Union has its pampered bureaucrats with their dachas, automobiles' and Black Sea vacations just as imperial Russia had its oligarchs; only the route to material possessions, not the fact of them, has changed. Perhaps that is the way it should be. Perhaps we need the nouveaux riches to provide us with comic relief arid the riches to encourage the arts. Perhaps we need to be able to believe that there is always the chance, no matter how slim, that our ship will come in, that we, now that Toots Shor's has closed and there is absolutely no place in New York to eat except Nathan's and '21', may be invited to lunch one day with David Frost in Bermuda. The only thing to remember about the rich is never to take them seriously, which is to say at their own value.

For as Ernest Hemingway Dnce remarked to Scott Fitzgerald, there is only one difference between wealthy people and the rest of us: They have more money. And while it is true that money can't buy happiness, most of those who in their lives have been both poor and rich are prepared to admit that the latter state, with all its problems, is infinitely preferable to the former, despite all that business of the camel and the eye of a needle. lated that a certain amount of public extravagance is desirable in that it provides those less blessed with the goods of this world with the vicarious pleasure of watching others do precisely what they would do had they the opportunity. Be that as it may, the folk-memories of those who have had money for a long time, people like the Howard family of England who have been wealthy since Henry VIII heaped lands and titles upon the Earl-Marshal of England, instinctively tells them It is neither fitting nor safe to make ostentatious display of their wealth. Even Howard Hughes in his sound-proof suite in the Caribbean (if there is a Howard Hughes) may hear in pensive moments tumbrils rattling across cobblestone streets.

For the rich know, if the poor do not, that there is a greater disparity of income in this country than most people realize. There are, for instance, 3,000 American families with annual incomes of more than $1 million; at the bottom of the scale are 12.8 million families with annual incomes of $5,000 or less. The graduated federal income tax, adopted in 1913, was de Nixon Now in Position to Blame Hanoi Gannett News Service WASHINGTON President Nixon has put himself in a position to defend a slowdown in the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam-if it becomes necessary-in publicizing an eight-point Indochina peace program the free world has found generally acceptable. This is not to suggest that Nixon has any present intention of scaling down or stopping the U.S. pullout.

But that is inherent in the little noticed presidential threat in his national broadcast to meet force with adequate force if Hanoi refuses to negotiate and steps up military action. Nixon said that if the enemy rejects negotiations, he will continue to end American involvement in the war by withdraals "as the South Vietnamese develop the capacity to defend themselves." He will decide when that capacity is attained. The president punctuated this by saying: "If the enemy's answer to our peace offer is to step up their military attacks, I shall fully meet my responsibility as commander-in-chief of our armed forces to protect our remaining troops." The test of Nixon's determination in that direction may come soon if a new Communist offensive is launched in South Vietnam, as the administration's military experts have been predicting. If the South Vietnamese, who have taken over the combat burden, prove unequal to the task of defending themselves and the remaining American forces in this assault, Nixon wants to escape criticism for temporarily holding up the departure of combat divisions that otherwise would be on their way home. No longer can the Democrats say with any credibility that the President has "done nothing" toward bringing about a negotiated settlement.

They can quarrel with his appraoch, but nevertheless he has crowded them into an uncomfortable corner. Are they willing to support a complete U.S. pullout after Hanoi's rejection of a ceasefire leaves the war going full blast in all of Indochina? Can they join Hanoi in opposing an internationally-supervised election in South Vietnam in which all factions would be free to participate? In their eagerness to get U.S. troops and prisoners home, would they accept Hanoi's dubious word that the captives will be released but only after the Americans have pulled out lock, stock and barrel from Southeast Asia? Nixon has demonstrated again his political flexibility by making concessions to the domestic antiwar contingent. He has put a six-months date on total withdrawal, if Hanoi agrees to a ceasefire and return of prisoners.

He has the agreement of the criticized Thieu government to resign a month ahead of elections. If his democratic opponents persist in opposing these and other conditions, they will be reduced to advocating adject surrender to Hanoi's terms in order to get out of Indochina. There is solid doubt that such a retreat is acceptable to the bulk of the American people even in their let's-end-the-war frame of mind. Events may overtake him, but for the moment Nixon has succeeded in diminishing the Vietnam issue. He now is in a position to blame such action fully on Hanoi.

In this instance, would Nixon's critics find a hearing for their complaints if he resumed massive bombing the attackers' supply lines and air support for those in combat? Could he then be justifiably blamed for leaving behind a residue force he said he was willing to withdraw if his call for a ceasefire were accepted? These contingencies undoubtedly contributed to the President's disclosure of 26 months of futile efforts to attain secret agreements with Hanoi and his publication of terms he has offered. He is now on record, before any offensive starts, as having tried valiantly to negotiate himself out of the war. It also may have been more than coincidental that Nixon acted before the presidential primaries to defang the bitter criticism of his Democratic antiwar opponents. Both he and they are convinced that Hanoi will not accept his terms. But now the onus will be on Hanoi and not on Nixon.

PAUL MILLER, Publisher CUetNl C. DORSE Oenerel Menaaer STUART A. DUNHAM, Extcutjvt Editor RICHARD B. TUTTLE, Managing Editor DESMOND STONE, Editor, Editorial Page Published daily by Gannett 55 Exchange Rochester, N.Y. 11414, Paul Miller, chairman and chief executive) Allen H.

Neuharth, president; John R. Purcell, vice president finance and administration, treasurer; Douglas H. McCortdndele, secretary, Pirst published January 1, 1833, as the Morning Advertiser. Name changed to The Daily Democrat, February 17, 1834; combined with Tht Chronicle, December 1, 1870; with the Rochester Herald, 1924. TELEPHONE 232-7100.