HEALTH SCHEME

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23704, 11 January 1939, Page 10

HEALTH SCHEME

MOVEMENT IN AMERICA SIMILAR TO NEW ZEALAND’S PLAN VISITING DOCTOR’S COMMENT (Per United Press Association) WELLINGTON, Jan. 10. Though he declined to comment on the medical provision of the Government’s social security scheme. Dr H. E. Robertson, professor of pathology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, referred in an interview to-day to the desire of the Government of the United States to institute a national health scheme on the same broad lines as the New Zealand scheme. “In America,” he said, the Government thinks it can organise the treatment of medicine a lot better than the doctors in general. It is fair to say that the practice of medicine has made tremendous strides in the past 100 years, and those strides have been for the benefit of the people. 'All of that improvement has been brought about by the doctors themselves. I think we can trust them to make improvements m the future, but one very gravely doubts whether any sudden revolutionary change in the practice of medicine brought about by political means is going to be for the betterment of medical practice, and, therefore, of the citizens of any country." Dr Robertson said that the doctors in New Zealand were not surpassed anywhere in the world in the quality of their education or in their ideals of medical practice. The New Zealand and American health schemes were somewhat alike, in that in both countries no definite plan appeared to have yet been worked out and no definite time “ I afn opposed to any health scheme that takes away from the doctors themselves control of the methods by which they shall practice medicine,” Dr Robertson said. “ I feel that the tendency not only in New Zealand to magnify the ills of one class and visit them on another class is simply transferring the load from one portion of the community to Another.” Dr Robertson arrived at Auckland by the Monterey on December 23 and left Wellington to-night for Sydney by the Awatea. He intend? visiting Melbourne, Singapore, India, and finally England, before returning to America.