News stories from Saturday December 29, 1973

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

President Nixon signed a health bill that administration experts expect to have a major impact on medical care. Top health officials said the new law should help shift the emphasis on medical care to prevention of illness rather than on treatment of illness that has already developed. The new law authorizes the spending of $375 million over the next five years to help establish and evaluate health maintenance organizations throughout the country. Subscribers to such an organization would pay a pre-determined monthly or yearly fee and, in return, would be entitled to basic health care services. [New York Times] Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the United States might need to create a huge planning agency to coordinate and direct government economic policy. Such policy making is now scattered about Washington in various smaller agencies. Mr. Stein said the council had been stretched thin trying to oversee policy. "If the government is going to be as much involved in details as it's becoming, then the concept of a little C.E.A. with 16 professionals focusing mainly on fiscal and monetary policy will be inappropriate," he told a meeting of the American Economic Association in New York. [New York Times] A personal memorandum from the late J. Edgar Hoover has disclosed that H. R. Haldeman prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White House to issue a misleading explanation of the bureau's controversial investigation of Daniel Schorr, a newsman for the Columbia Broadcasting System. According to the Hoover memorandum and other Justice Department documents, Mr. Haldeman, while chief of the White House staff, conceived the misinformation that Mr. Schorr had come under investigation because he was being considered for a government post. [New York Times] Immigration investigators in New York have been put in charge of a new, countrywide effort to resolve the long-dormant cases of suspected Nazi war criminals living in the United States. They are focusing on 38 persons, according to the New York district director, Sol Marks. The effort, Mr. Marks said in an interview, involves what are believed to be the first tentative steps toward official contacts with the Soviet Union in a drive to collect evidence against some of the suspects. Almost all the cases concern post-war refugees from what was Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. [New York Times] Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain named the 65-year-old Interior Minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, who has a long record in law enforcement, as the new Premier and successor to Adm. Luis Carrero Blanco, who was assassinated Dec. 20. A few hours before the appointment became official, the Tribunal of Public Order, a special political court, gave a striking example of how firmly the Franco regime intended to defend itself after the assassination of Admiral Carrero Blanco, one of its key figures, by announcing prison terms ranging from 12 to 20 years for 10 labor organizers who had been condemned for leading underground "workers' commissions." [New York Times] Soviet officials took the position that their stand in the latest controversy surrounding Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had already been made known and they declined to say specifically what measures might be taken either against Mr. Solzhenitsyn or his foreign publishers. The Soviet press has not run a word about the new book "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956," which came out Friday as the Soviet Union was preparing for a long New Year weekend. [New York Times]