Doctors’ fees
Sir, — Your headline today, “P.M. rejects doctors’ G.M.S. rise,” is a distortion of fact that Sir Robert Muldoon will not challenge because it is in line with his policy of supporting the rich against the poor. The general medical services benefit was never a gift to doctors, but part of social security legislation for all the sick, and, while most G.P.s claimed the amount, then often the whole fee, on behalf of patients, the Medical Association opposed “socialist medicine” and many members made clients collect their own. Sir Robert Muldoon, rejecting the rise in the G.M.S. benefit, now about 10 per cent of charges, refused, typically, to see journalists, happy to foster the false impression that greedy doctors, rather than a heartless Government, are denying balanced medical care. The mischievous whittling away of social welfare accelerates as our nation’s wealth gets progressively into fewer and fewer hands. — Yours, etc.,
VARIAN J. WILSON. April 11, 1984.
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Press, 13 April 1984, Page 20
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157Doctors’ fees Press, 13 April 1984, Page 20
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