DOCTORS' BAD DEBTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20392, 22 October 1929, Page 8

DOCTORS' BAD DEBTS.

FEELING economic pinch

EXPERIENCE IN SYDNEY,

FORCETHJLNESS OF PATIENTS,'

[teom ottb own correspondent.] ■I SYDNEY. Oct. 17 * • . ~ It is nnfortu.nate for doctors that every* thing about them and their professioa suggests affluence. Some, admittedly, ara wealthy, but, speaking of the profession in Sydney, whatever may be the case j n New Zealand, many of them are having a rather hard struggle, with fewer people in the present economic stress running to them with all sorts of trifling and often imaginary ills, and worge still, with un< paid bills of pelican-like proportions. Doc< tors decline, of course, to make a song about their bad, debts and their longwinded patients, but it is an open secret! that they are feeling the economic pinch like most other people. According to one Sydney medical man of many years' practice things have never been so bad in the profession as at pre* sent. He whispers the fact, for exavnple —for even the walls of the British Medical Association might have ears—that solid people, accustomed, ordinarily, to paying "on the nail," are to-day, to put it politely, a trifle long-winded with thein bills. At the same time, doctors, in common with their more plebeian neigh* bours, are not exempt from the demands for early settlement of butcher's, baker's and other billis, of heavy rent accounts, and of income and other taxes which' Governments and councils exact. Doctors' bad debts to day are assessed at a mink mum of 15 per cent. The medical man with hundreds of pounds outstanding is said to be not & rara avis by any means. If there are anr rare birds about, they are the patienta who ore meeting their bills promptly, In spite of it all—of an obviously oven crowded profession, and of the fact tha# the comparatively few at the top of tha tree can alone hope to make big money-i the medical course at the Sydney tJriiven sity is still one of the most popular 61 th 6 faculties.

Doctors' patients have been divided into three classes; the considerate ones, tohos* cheques by return of post can be counted upon as a certainty; those who roll up, very often, in aristocratic cars, and get' very annoyed if they have to be reminded a few times about their bills; and, ia the third category, those who know quite •well that if they hang off long enough their doctors will get sick of attempting to collect a few pounds, and wipe tha accounts off as bad debts rather than as a last resort try to collect the money, through the Courts—a process which doctors generally regard as repugnant. Women are regarded as the worst offenders generally, although they are the most exacting patients. The spectacle of doctors going aDout with their neels down and with patches in their tweed trousers, is not, of course, imminent, but, in Sydney at all events, they are, for the most part, feeling the economic pinch in a more t severe form than is generally imagined* All is not gold that glitters on a briU hantly polished professional plate.