Doctors warned not to use 'blackmail’

Press, 17 May 1984, Page 1

Doctors warned not to use 'blackmail’

PA

Wellington

All State support for medical practices could be reconsidered, the Minister of Health, Mr Malcolm, warned yesterday, as he labelled some doctors’ action over fees as an “attempt at blackmail.”

Mr Malcolm said the health system tried to keep costs low. If traditional roles were threatened by doctors’ actions, he could look at: ® Controlling fees by regulation. ® Reconsidering the subsidy that provides for a free nurse in every practice at taxpayers’ expense. ® "And indeed even the whole question of why it is we are supporting medical practices and the actions of medical practitioners to the extent of something like $177,000 a year a practitioner.”

Mr Malcolm was responding to a report that the South Canterbury branch of the Medical Association was warning that disadvantaged people could lose out because fee increases had to be restricted to $l.

The branch was referring to pensioners, large families, the unemployed and others “struggling to make ends meet.”

A spokesman for a meeting of 10 general practitioners in South Canterbury, Dr Richard Forster, said doctors had in the past carried the disadvantaged at their own expense by not charging the full consultation

fees, not charging them at all, or by writing a prescription after a telephone consultation only. “This private charity would tend to come to an end and all consultation would then be charged at full rates,” he said. Mr Malcolm said the South Canterbury doctors were “simply holding their patients to ransom against every principle that I thought the doctors of this country stood for.” “I think it is an attempt at blackmail,” the Minister told reporters.

Doctors told him in recent years that they would pass any benefit to patients.

“The actions and the statements they are making now suggest they were attempting to mislead me in the past arguments,” the Minister said. Mr Malcolm said doctors did not charge a fee in many cases. “It is because of that sort of thing that we provide over $3O million a year to general practitioners in general medical service benefits. For that reason the taxpayer pays for the costs of their practice nurses,” he said.

He was grateful to doc-

tors for the many cases of free service. “But when we have some doctors taking as much as $6OO a week extra at a time when their patients are getting $8 a week extra, that is not fair,” said Mr Malcolm. “If doctors prove themselves to be simply selfish and seeking extra income outside of the rules that apply to everybody else, they will inevitably invite a situation where I have to recommend to Cabinet that we regulate and control the situation. “I don’t want to do it, but my hand is being forced.” Mr Malcolm denied charges that he was confronting doctors. “What has happened is that the doctors are confronting their patients with price increases that are simply not reasonable,” he said.

Doctors did not “stand apart from all the other sectors of the community.” “I would expect them to provide the same good service that general practitioners have always provided, on the same basis. I would expect them to recover whatever is justifiable,” said Mr Malcolm.