PARADISE FOR DOCTORS

Grey River Argus, 21 March 1945, Page 5

PARADISE FOR DOCTORS

N,Z. MEDICAL SCHEME ~ Ridiculed by Sydney Journalist SYDNEY, March 20. The “Sydney Daily Telegraph” today publishes an article by: Mr D. L. Thompson, the paper’s chief of start, who recently visited New Zealand, where (the paper says) he examined New Zealand’s free medical service yystem. Mr. Thompson says: One of every sixty boys in the schoolleaving group in New Zealand takes medicine. This is not because of ary starred-eyed resolve to save humanity from pain. It is because, under social security and its free medical service, the most ungifted doctor is assured of two thousand to four thousand pounds yearly. A man with a' shrewd head for systematising his practice can (and does) make eight to ten thousand yearly. The New Zealand experiment in free doctoring is a valuable lesson to Australia in how not to do it. The failure is due partly to the destructive attitude of the British Medical Association to all the Government’s plans, and partly to a Government which by false pretences, sold the public a service which it did not possess to sell. It is the most lucrative thing a general practitioner ever dreamed of. His bad debts (normally about thirty per cent.) have vanished. With about twenty-five per cent, of his colleagues on war service there is one doctor in New Zealand to every two thousand to three thousand patients. The peacetime figure was one to fourteen hundred. The money barrier between doctor and patient having vanished, the doctor no longer restricts visits out of consideration of the patient’s purse. He makes every attendance that is necessary, some that are not, and every time up pops 7s 6d out of the Government’s bottomless purse. Mr. Thompson added: “Of course, the system is being abused. Patients make frivolous calls on the doctor. Some doctors, unscrupulously, extend lheir patients’' illnesses, continuing their dailv attendance right through the convalescence and past it. Evils have resulted. It is hard to get a city doctor to visit at all. It is almost impossible at night. The reason is that the fee for a call and a' visit is the same. All the patients are herded through the consulting room, on lodge practice system. They are encouraged to step lively. The doctor’s income depends on the speed at which they pass him. His secretary writes a chit like lightning. The patient signs. The Government pays! The shilling in the pound is not enough to meet all this, plus pensions, plus free medicine. It takes another four million pounds from the Consolidated revenue. Yet out of all of this money the public is getting the old form of medical service, but is paying for it in a new way. The young doctor is attracted away from" research /and specialisation into general work. The specialists say that the general practioner tends to shirk any case presenting the least difficulty. He passes it on to the overcrowded hospital, or to the specialists. And, of the specialist’s two guinea fee, the government still pays only 7s 6d. The patient finds the rest. If you want a fifty guinea operation, the government pays onlv 7s 6d towards it, and a couple of other 7s 6d’s, if there are post-operative calls. That is because, if you will have a big operation, you are expected to get it for nothing at the public hospitals. But, at the public hospital, it is left to a clerk to decide which doctor will do the job, and the public hospitals are more overcrowded, and worse staffed than the big private hospitals. “Some advantages can be seen from, the new scheme. Patients now run to the doctor with a sore finger. They want their shilling in the pound’s worth. That is why the boys leaving school want to become doctors—general practitioners. New Zealand, with a population of sixteen hundred thousand, now allows about two hundred and seventy students to begin first year medicine at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. There only were one hundred offered before Social Security. Who is to blame the lads, if some of them sneer at the professors of medicine who are paid a paltry two thousand pounds yearly? They will themselves will be getting four thousand in six years time. The professors hit back savagely. They fail forty-five per cent, of the students at the end of the first year. That is because the full medical course is available only at the Otago University, and the maximum intake there is one hundred and twenty students.