HEALTH INSURANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 74, 24 September 1937, Page 5

HEALTH INSURANCE

NATIONAL SCHEME

REPLY TO CRITICISM

SPEECH BY DR. M CMILLAN

National health insurance was the main topic in the speech made by Dr. D. G. McMillan (Government, Dunedin West) in the Address-in-Reply debate in the House of Representatives last

evening.

Thousands of people in New Zealand failed to receive full medical services, said Dr. McMillan. The only way to meet medical expenses uncertain to the individual, and for which he could not budget, was on the group insurance basis. The effects of illness were not confined to the individual afflicted. There was the risk of infection of the community, and the possibility of undue hardship to the individual's dependants. Illness meant loss of income and loss of production.

It was reliably estimated that the cost of medical services in New Zealand was £6.000,000 per annum, said Dr. McMillan. Those costs were everybody's concern. The problem for the Government was not to find more money, but to find new and better ways of spending the money available. Health services should be as freely available to the community as education. It was recognised by all that the State could not afford to let people grow up without education Surely the preservation of lives and health was as important, if not more important, than the training of the mind and the development of culture. It was recognised by all students of the problem that the State must make itself responsible for the health of its citizens. The solution of the problem lay in the introduction of a group sys.tem of insurance to meet medical expenses. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION. Dr. McMillan said it had been asserted by critics of health insurance that it destroyed the initiative and progress of the medical profession, but he would point out that most of the outstanding advances in medical science had been made by socialised doctors with nothing to gain but the satisfaction of having done a job well. In addition to its inherent tendencies to raise the standard of medical practice, health insurance also brought additional supervision, which demanded adherence to a certain standard of practice. Although it was not often men-

tioned, it was that supervision which excited a measure of opposition to health insurance schemes.

Sir Heni-y Brackenbury, a former chairman of the Council of the British Medical Association and the medical authority whom the New Zealand branch of the B.M.A. had brought into the Dominion to advise it on health insurance, was quoted among other authorities by Dr. McMillan as an advocate of national health insurance It could safely.be assumed, he concluded, that the doubts and fears which were being freely expressed by the medical profession, and as freely exploited by opponents of the Government, would prove as groundless as had similar scare-mongering in Great Britain.