DISEASE A STATE WAR

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 6, 2 October 1941, Page 9

DISEASE A STATE WAR

Clinic System Urged “Instead of helping the Government to turn a capitation measure into a clinic measure, the doctors have insisted on turning it into a ‘keep the people ill’ Bill,” said Mr. Lee (Democratic Labour, Grey Lynn). “The amendments only embody the demands made by the doctors for increased payments and the principle is not altered at all.” Mr. Lee was refused an extension of time. “The doctors altered their tactics as soon as they saw another 2/6 in sight,” Mr. Lee said. “This House takes off Its hat to the doctors, but heaven nelp the miners if they demanded another 50 per cent, iu their hewing rates or the waterside workers a little more. While every member will accept this Bill rather than see the patient compelled to pay, one will feel a measure of regret that the doctors did not assist to make the first measure better.” ‘ Mr. Lee said that the war against disease should be a State war. They fought Hitler by giving every man a bayonet and a bomb, but was the war against disease any less of a national affair? I don’t care if every doctor is paid a fee as large as the highest that is paid them now,” Mr. Lee confined. “It is better to do that than to pay 7/6 and give them a vested interest in disease. Modern medicine without a social effort is impossible, and every time we attempt to improve the standard Of medical treatment we have to have increased social effort. The time has arrived when the war against disease should be a social effort and the Government will soon realize the necessity for increasing the scope of the Bill.” Mr. Lee said he believed that a clinic system was the best, and he was pleased to see that the Minister had made it possible .under the Bill for a doctor to come to an arrangement by which a clinic could be established. What was important was that they should make it possible for boys and girls to enter the medical profession without having to have wealth behind them. Money should be used for that purpose. A clinic system could have been arranged if the doctors had co-operated, and each clinic* would have been a school for the doctor and he would grow up with it. “I am sorry for the Opposition, because they helped to bid tbe doctors up and tbeu the doctors ran out on them,” Mr. Lee said. "The Offiwsitiou helped to make the Bill worse.”