FREE MEDICINE

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 184, 5 July 1945, Page 5

FREE MEDICINE

DELAY IN AUSTRALIA >' benefitsTostponed (N.Z. Press Association. —Copyright-.) (Special Correspondent.) (Rec. 9.30 a.m.) SYDNEY. July 4. Australian doctors and chemists do not- expect the Federal Government’s free medicine scheme to come into force this year. Originally it was intended that the scheme should begin on July 1. They base their belief on the slow progress of the negotiations between the Government and the spokesmen for the chemists and doctors. The negotiations are delayed by differences of opinion about the prices which the I ree Medicine Fund should pay chemists for medicines from the official list of prescriptions, known as the formulary. The general secretary of the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association (Dr John Jlimter) said that the provision restricting free medicine to items on the formulary was still the ll.M.A.’s principal objection to the scheme. He added that the British and New Zealand schemes used the formularies, but did not restrict free medicine to the items on them. The doctors fear that if the Australian scheme were introduced in its present form patients would ask for prescriptions which could be obtained free, even if the doctor considered that if a prescription not on the formulary—and therefore not free to the patient—was required. The scheme could be neither operated nor properly policed without the active co-operation of the doctors. The failure of the New Zealand authorities to obtain this co-operation in policing their scheme was apparent, in the enormous increase in the consumption of Ifee medicine, he said. In 1939-40, the first year in which medicines were supplied free in New Zealand, the cost to the Government was £260,000. Last year the cost had risen to £750,000. New Zealand’s experience reinforced the B.M.A.’s claim for independent control of health schemes. Free medicine and associated schemes should be controlled by a body which had some measure of separate existence and was not subject to direct Ministerial or other political pressure, concluded Dr Hunter.