1 Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University School of Medicine, 60 College Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510
Dr. Dixon makes a well-balanced, mildly critical presentation of EPSDT elsewhere in this issue. We are more hopeful of the eventual impact of EPSDT and less sanguine about its present success than the author. For a long time there has been no real concern with the desperate, even scandalous neglect of child health by government. This was, of course, at the same time that we were exposed to the pious cant about "heritage of the future" and "a nation's most precious possession." Consequently, for Secretary Gardner to have achieved the Congressional approval for as wide-ranging a proposal as the mandated examination and treatment of every eligible child was an historic success.