I HAVE CALLED this Conference with one purpose in mind: to bring together the best minds and the boldest ideas to deal with the pressing health needs of this nation.
The urgency of those needs is undeniable: --Nearly 15 million people suffer from heart disease;
--Forty-eight million people, healthy today, will become victims of cancer;
--One-fifth of our children under age seventeen are afflicted with chronic ailments.
Many citizens have been left behind in our advance toward better treatment and better health--some because of inadequate health manpower; others because of obsolete or scarce treatment facilities; and others because health services are not organized efficiently enough to provide first-rate service.
I believe that a great nation can do better. I believe that this Conference can give new strength and energy to our national effort to recruit health professionals, extend health services and improve treatment.
If we are to launch a new era for medicine-an era even more dramatic than the last a decades--we must begin by setting new goals:
--To increase the life expectancy of our citizens;
--To achieve a healthier environment;
--To decrease the infant mortality rate in the United States;
--To improve our understanding and care of the mentally ill;
--To eliminate such diseases as tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough.
Ours is a great opportunity to advance ideas which will contribute not only to a healthier America, but to a better world.
We have the resources; we need only the will and the leadership.
Let us raise our sights--and unlimber our imaginations.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
Note: The President's message was made public as part of a White House release announcing that 600 leaders in the health professions, education, and other fields would attend the White House Conference on Health to be held on November 3-4 at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington.
On August 30 the White House announced the formation of a group of the Nation's leading health experts to serve as an executive committee to make plans for the conference. The release stated that the committee would assist the conference chairman, Dr. George Beadle, Nobel Prize winner and President of the University of Chicago, and the executive vice chairman, Boisfeuillet Jones, President of the Woodruff Foundation of Atlanta, Ca.
The membership of the executive committee follows: Marion Folsom, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Chairman, Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, N.Y.; Dr. George James, Commissioner of Health, City of New York; Dr. Leona Baumgartner, New York, former Deputy Administrator, Agency for International Development; Dr. Lowell T. Coggeshall, trustee and former dean of the Medical School, University of Chicago; Ray Brown, director of the Graduate Degree Program in Hospital Administration, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Dr. Montague Cobb, professor of anatomy, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Dr. Nelson H. Cruikshank, Director of Social Security, AFL-CIO, Washington, D.C.; Dr. Michael DeBakey, professor of surgery, Baylor University, Houston, Tex.; and Dr. Dwight Wilbur, surgeon, San Francisco, Calif.
On October 28 the White House announced that 500 health leaders would participate in the conference discussions which would be led by 81 panelists (1 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 435). See also Item 424.
The text of the message was released at Austin, Tex.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Message to the White House Conference on Health. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241135