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Abstract
This is about the late Terrence E Carroll (1925-2009). His work focused, as he put it, on educating about the distinction between health care and medical care. The former involved the entire panoply of services that determine a population's health status, such as a full-employment economy with non-hazardous jobs at adequate wages. The key to this, as he saw it, was class struggle. This meant, among other things, repeal of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and its sequel, the Landrum-Griffin-Kennedy Act and an anti-union NLBR, which had impeded workers' efforts to unionize and obtain fair working conditions and wages. During his years of advocacy from the 1960s as director of the National Institutes on Rehabilitation and Health Services (NIRHS) until his death, when he was president of the National Association for Public Health Policy (NAPHP), he found first, organized medicine and later, the insurance industry to be the implacable foe of labor in its efforts to improve health services.
Keywords: Health care, trade unions, class stmggle
Introduction
This is a biographical sketch of Terence Evan Carroll (1925-2009), a lifelong political activist and public health advocate in Detroit, Michigan and Washington DC. From 1960, when he served as director of the National Institutes on Rehabilitation and Health Services (NIRHS) until the time of his death, when he was heading up the National Association for Public Health Policy (NAPHP), he supported every advance made in the difficult task of establishing and improving America's socialized health system. There are several accounts [1-3] that summarize some of his achievements. This article expands upon those accounts.
Terence Carroll was bom on August 21, 1925 in the Detroit, Michigan suburb of Berkley, the son of Philip Joseph Carroll (1885-1939) and Effie Jeanette (Grubb) Carroll (1881-1977). His father, in addition to being a rubber worker in an auto factory in the 1920s and a house painter in the 1930s, was both a founding member of the Michigan Communist party and also what Terence Carroll termed a "utilitarian Catholic." The elder Carroll helped build St. Mary's Parish church in Royal Oak. The Catholics had requested the new church from the diocese in order to cut down on the travel distance to the neighboring Our Lady of La Salette church. With the...