The Press THURSDAY, JULY 19, 1962. Saskatchewan Doctors’ Strike

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29878, 19 July 1962, Page 12

The Press THURSDAY, JULY 19, 1962. Saskatchewan Doctors’ Strike

The Saskatchewan doctors’ strike is the climax to more than two years’ argument about the Provincial Government’s proposals for extending its compulsoryhealth insurance programme to cover doctors’ fees and other medical expenses. In 1947 Saskatchewan (which has been governed by the socialist Commonwealth Co-opera-tive Federation for the last 18 years) pioneered a system of hospital benefits that since has been adopted in all other Canadian provinces. Last November the Saskatchewan Legislature enacted the Medical Care Insurance Act, which came into force on July 1, 1962, instead of April 1, as originally scheduled. This act compels every resident of Saskatchewan to join the Government’s insurance scheme and to pay a fixed premium. The doctors are to be paid on a “ fee-for- “ service ” basis, and each patient may recover his fees from the Government. The scale of fees has been fixed at 85 per cent, of a schedule determined by the doctors themselves in 1959. There is general agreement that remuneration under the scheme will be satisfactory. The issue on which the doctors struck is control of the scheme by a commission of eight persons, only two of them doctors. According to the strikers, the commission is given absolute power over conditions of medical practice, and (in terms of the Act) ordinary private practice has been made illegal

The Canadian Medical Association is adamantly antagonistic to any universal, compulsory, taxsupported, comprehensive medical service. Its aim is a scheme whereby those who can afford to do so would

insure themselves against illness, and under which medical care for less prosperous citizens would be subsidised from public funds. The Saskatchewan Government has offered, as a compromise, arrangements for doctors to practise outside its insurance scheme, and for their patients to claim reimbursement of 85 per cent, of the fees paid privately. Feelings have run too high for what appears a reasonable offer to be considered temperately. Inevitably, through striking, the doctors have forfeited much sympathy that otherwise would be commanded by their protestations of concern for professional standards. The doctors claim to have arranged “ a very good “ emergency service but this will not silence critics who see in the doctors’ refusal of duty a clear breach of the Hippocratic oath. How seriously the strike jeopardises human lives and welfare is impossible to judge; every death from uncertain causes may add to public bitterness.

The strike has other unfortunate features. About 100 of the 900 Saskatchewan members of the College of Physicians and Surgeons are Britons who left the United Kingdom rather than work under the National Health Service. Now volunteers are being sought in Britain, as well as elsewhere in Canada and in the United States, to fill vacancies in health services that, even before the strike, were short of doctors to care for Saskatchewan’s 925,000 people. Whether further concessions will overcome the doctors’ resistance to the insurance scheme, or whether the Provincial Government must capitulate, should be seen very soon.