Dr. McMillan Replies To Dr. Jamieson

Northern Advocate, 28 September 1938, Page 3

Dr. McMillan Replies To Dr. Jamieson

[Per Press Association. Copyright.] WELLINGTON, This' Day. Dr. McMillan has replied as follows to Dr. Jamieson: Dr. Jamieson’s suggestion that my

quotations from Dr. Brackenbury arc incomplete and misleading is not only unfair but contrary to fact and cannot be substantiated.

I repeat my challenge to him to come on tc tire public debating platform. to line his statements up with mine, give the public an opportunity to hear both sides of the case, and then judge which is better —the Government’s or Dr. Jamieson's, and whose statements are the mere accurate, his or mine. In his statements, Dr. Jamieson fails to make a clear differentiation between his own opinions and these of Dr. Brackenbury. The point I make in reference to Great Britain is that before the scheme was introduced, the doctors opposed it. saying that it would lower the standard cx medical practice in Great Britain. Even after they commenced to work the scheme, the representative body passed a motion recording its emphatic protest against the “discreditable” methods adopted by the Government to compel them to give unwilling service on terms which “this meeting considers to be derogatory to the profession and against the public interest.” Now the parent body of the B.M.A. says that it has been an undoubted success.

My logical and reasonable argument is that just as the conscientious doubts and fears expressed by the British doctors proved groundless, so too will those which are being conscientiously expressed by many New Zealand doctors today. Dr. Jamieson says: “In his reference to the standard of medical practice inside and outside the insurance scheme. Sir Henry Brackenbiiry’s comparison related to health insurance practice and similar practice under private contract with societies.” That is not so. I have it here before me—November 12, 1927, “Dr. Brackenbury believed personally that on the whole the insurance medical service was rather higher than the other in its general level of efficiency, though this was not capable of proof.” Again; “It is safe to say that the quality of the service rendered is at least as high among insurance doctors as it is, say, in private practice.” In reference to his visit to New Zealand, Sir Henry said: “I found, too, that among the general body of practitioners there was still a considerable ignorance of the working of the national health insurance system in Great Britain, and a misconception of its results alike to the public and the profession.”