‘NO LONGER DOING JOB’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31151, 30 August 1966, Page 1

‘NO LONGER DOING JOB’

N.Z.M.A. Attack On Benefit

(New Zealand Press Association*

WELLINGTON, August 29.

The New Zealand Medical Association said today that the general medical service benefit had been allowed to dwindle to a point where it could no longer do the job for which it was introduced.

“It no longer protects the average citizen from financial hardship when he seeks medical care outside a hospital and it no longer safeguards standards of general practice which will enable the general practitioner to keep people out of hospitals,” it said in its latest bulletin.

“The natural thing to do under these circumstances would be to raise the benefit to a value at which it can once more

perform these functions.

“This is the unanimous opinion of the committee on availability and distribution of the British Medical Association and the N.Z.M.A.” The N.Z.M.A. said both political parties had “other ideas.”

According to the National Party the benefit—as a piece of socialism —must be allowed to atrophy into nothingness, it said.

According to the Labour Party the benefit would be raised only if doctors were prepared to negotiate away their right to charge realistic private fees. But such fees were the main protection against abuse of the service and the only guarantee of professional freedom, the bulletin said.

"The sooner the organisation of medical care is taken out of the hands of our illinformed politicians and handed over to an autonomous corporation directed by experts the better it will be not only for our sick people but also for our economy,” said the N.Z.M.A.

“The fact that the present arrangement has proved satisfactory to patients, doctors and the exchequer stands for nothing,” it said. Socialised medicine and private-enterprise medicine should, in the interests of medical care, effect a reasonable compromise, the association said. “New Zealand has managed to hit on such a compromise in arranging the remuneration of general practitioners.

“This compromise, which came about as the result of a clash between the opposing views of the Labour Party and of the medical profession, has worked extremely well,” it said. “We are now faced with the spectacle of both major political parties being apparently determined, quite wantonly, to destroy this inestimable national asset,” it said.