MEDICAL STANDARDS

Evening Star, Issue 22722, 9 August 1937, Page 16

MEDICAL STANDARDS

HEALTH INSURANCE CRITIC ANSWERED [Per United Press Association.] WELLINGTON, August 8. “In his address to the Hastings Rotary Club Dr Cashmore complains that the Government’s health insurance scheme will react to the of the standard of medical practice in New Zealand,’ said Dr D, G. M'Millan, M.P., chairman of the National Health Insurance Committee, in an interview to-day. “Dr Cashmere’s statement seems to indicate that medical men are more devoted to the feo than to the science of medicine. I cannot accept such a low estimation of the medical profession in this country.” [Dr R. G. Cashmore (chairman of the Hastings branch of the British Medical Association), in an address at a meeting of the Hastings Rotary Club on Friday, said that most doctors were against the proposed health insurance scheme, and many would leave the country rather than work under the scheme, although they would get more money from it than they were now receiving. It was not any financial consideration which was influencing them. They were acting in the interests of the health of the country. Under the Government scheme, he continued, doctors would become too busy to give individual patients the attention they deserved, and the elimination of competition would remove any incentive to study and undertake constant research. The Government was making a beginning by socialising doctors because they were the smallest body in the country and their votes counted for nothing.]