EXPENSIVE INSURANCE
[To the Editor of THE .SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your paragraph headed "Expensive Insurance" touches a very sore spot.
I should like to give you my experience. I was for just forty years in general practice in a small Midland town. From the first I came into close contact with industrial insur- ance. It was soon apparent to me that poor people who had a sick relative were persuaded by canvassing agents to effect what were virtually fraudulent insurances, and that people who were unrelated to and had no insurable interest in the sick person were likewise persuaded to take out policies. Whenever I gave a death certificate stating that the fatal disease had existed for—say—two years, I invariably had friends and Insurance agents begging me to furnish a certificate with no duration of disease stated. They were obviously
quite surprised when I refused and referred them to the Registrar for a copy of my certificate. In most of these cases, of course, payment was repudiated by the company concerned and the premiums were lost. This was the great argument used to get round the doctor, namely, that his poor patients would lose their money.
I grew so disgusted with the whole business in a few years that I refused in future to have anything to do with the Societies. I declined to examine any candidates for them and refused to give any certificate or report beyond the legal death certificate.
The result, of course, was that I made an enemy of each of the many canvassing agents in the district, and that when the Insurance Act came in my panel was, and remained, the smal- lest in the town—about a quarter that of each of my four medical colleagues. I never repented my action, for I had kept my hands clean of a most disreputable business.
This, of course, was in the nineteenth century, and things may be better now, but judging from the figures you give I
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