Report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1740277147

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-132094

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Stationery Office

Year of publication:: 1926

Scope:: XII, 394 S.

Digitisation:: 2020

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter V. The development of the health services

Collection:: Economics Books

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.

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