MAJORITY REPORT. 
vd 
of Friendly Societies (Q.11,004-11,011), we have found no support 
for this allegation. On the contrary, there has been a great body 
of evidence not only from the interested parties—the doctors and 
chemists—but from Societies and representative bodies showing 
that no such distinction is made. There is, we need hardly say, 
no justification for such a distinction in the Act or the Regula- 
tions, and any practitioner or chemist deliberately differentiating 
between insurance and private patients in this way would be sub- 
ject to disciplinary action. As this is a matter which from time to 
time engages the attention of the public, a few general observa- 
tions may, perhaps, be permissible. 
73. The assertion that doctors are comparatively inatten- 
tive to their insurance patients—a statement more common 
in unrestrained conversation and in letters to the Press than 
in formal evidence—is peculiarly difficult to test, inasmuch 
as, in the nature of things, it almost necessarily rests on 
vague Impressions or sporadic and unrepresentative incidents. 
Tt is, perhaps, proper to observe that in a service comprising 
15,000 doctors it is impossible to postulate that all will, at all 
times and in all circumstances, maintain a superlative standard 
of efficiency and care. It must needs that offences come. The 
medical profession, like every other craft and calling, can claim 
no immunity from the intrusion of undesirable and unworthy 
elements. Nor does this imply any disrespect towards an 
honourable profession ; it is merely an acknowledgment of their 
common humanity. Isolated cases of negligence and careless- 
ness, therefore, prove nothing; such occur in private practice 
also. Tven if it were established statistically that there were 
proportionately more causes of complaint in insurance practice 
than in private practice, this, again, would in itself prove 
nothing. The causes of complaint might be due to the industrial 
or social peculiarities of certain areas or to the idiosyncracies of 
certain doctors, and these might. manifest themselves irrespective 
of the arrangements under which the doctor was giving his 
service. As against the rather vague suggestions that have been 
made, it is only right to refer to one other consideration put in 
evidence before us, namely, that. there is a growing tendency 
among practitioners to be more scrupulous to avoid giving offence 
in the case of insurance patients than in the case of private 
patients, since the former are, in a sense, protected by the 
machinery under the Act for the investigation of complaints. 
(Brock, Q. 1051.) We suggest, finally, that the only satis- 
factory evidence available is that which expresses the views of 
those who have seen the operation of medical benefit at close 
quarters and who, having seen it in bulk, are unlikely to be 
unduly influenced by any random deviation from the general 
standard such as is apt to sway the judgment of those less 
intimately informed on these matters. Of such a character are 
the views we have already quoted.