* * * * The.Govenunent's financial and economic proposals have
not been announced as I write, but I hope Sir Stafford Cripps is still consider- ing, not merely on financial grounds, his suggestion that National Health Service patients should be required to pay some small fee when consulting a doctor. It is quite clear that the free service is being abused, and that doctors' time and strength is being to a large extent squandered over trivialities. One of them, for example, writes to the Manchester Guardian: "Our surgeries arc overcrowded, not with people who are ill, but with people coming for certificates or, in many cases, for repeat medicines or trivial complaints. Of the former the variety is apparently endless. I have been recently asked to give certificates for the following: Extra petrol, electric immersion heaters, electric cookers, milk and eggs, absence from school, excusing from gymnasium, absence from work more than two days but not requiring National Health Service certificate, witnessing passports, mortgage bond, certificate that an examination for glasses is required, corsets, brassieres, family-allowance applications, lost ration-books, Certificates of character for adoption and employment purposes."
Not everything here, perhaps, is unnecessary, but there is all the difference between enabling persons genuinely unwell to get the necessary treatment free and creating conditions which make it impossible for doctors to give proper attention to persons genuinely unwell. Such conditions, I am afraid, are in fact being created.
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