MAJORITY REPORT.
165
from our immediate recommendations on the Insurance Scheme,
and suggest that the matter should be left over to be considered
In connexion with any wider proposals for reorganising the health
services of the community which may commend themselves to
later students of the problem.
SECTION D.—INSURANCE COMMITTEES.
SUCCESSFUL WORK OF THE COMMITTEES.
374. We have already mentioned in Chapter V our conclusion
as to the disappearance of Insurance Committees not only as
Part of any future arrangement for the co-ordination of the
Insurance Medical Service with other health services, but also as
an element of the present Insurance Scheme. As these
bodies have played a very important and successful part in the
provision of medical benefit during the last 13 years, we must
Necessarily devote some space to the justification of their pro-
Posed demise. We desire to state at the outset that we have
had no evidence of failure on the part of these Committees or
their officers to perform adequately the task which they had to
undertake. On the contrary, their work has been done with a
Notable degree of success and we have received many tributes to
the zeal and thoroughness which have characterised it. For
€xample, Mr. Brock, giving evidence on behalf of the Ministry
of Health, states (Q. 23,974) : *“ But I should like to add that,
Whatever may be the shortcomings of Insurance Committees as
bart of the machinery of local government, that is in no way
traceable to any failure on the part of their staffs, and I should
like to put it on record, if I may, that the clerks to Insurance
Committees, with very few exceptions, have carried out their
duties, without any precedents to guide them, extraordinarily
well, and I think we owe to their work a great deal of such
Measure of success as has been achieved in the very difficult task
of accustoming 12,000 or more doctors to that degree of super-
Vision that participation in the public service implies. The
Insurance Committees’ staffs have done their work exceedingly
well, and IT want to make it quite clear that, while I cannot
dissent from the general criticism of Insurance Committees, I
do want to pay my tribute to the efficiency of the work of their
staffs.”” Sir William Glyn Jones, to whose vigorous recomi-
mendations that Insurance Committees should be abolished we
shall refer later, in reply to the question (Q. 24,420) whether the
officials of the Committees had carried out in an efficient manner
the duties falling upon them, replied ‘* Undoubtedly, I think the
officials have done extraordinarily well.” Again the same
Witness did not consider that the present position was ‘‘ due to
any slackness on the part of the Insurance Committees them.
selves or their officials ** (Q. 24,402). We would also refer to
