The third plan is that of starting a salaried service.
The service will not be a whole-time service ; for the doctors will be allowed to attend to uninsured persons, provided that they belong to the "insured class," that is if they belong to the family of an insured person, or to an approved society, with- out themselves being insured. It will not be easy, Mr. Lloyd George remarked, to work a salaried service and a panel in the same district without unfairness to the doctors on the panel. In spite of this difficulty, the third plan was apparently the one which appealed most strongly to the Advisory Committee. In response to an appeal from a member of the Committee, Mr. Lloyd George promised that the panels should not be closed in any district with a view to enforcing these various expedients, until the Commissioners were absolutely assured that the doctors were resolved to oppose the Act. It is clear, in short, that these schemes are largely in the nature of a threat designed to break down finally the doctors' opposition. Whether the threat succeeds or not, Mr. Lloyd George is certainly turning his professedly humane medical benefits into an exquisite instrument of Caesarism. It is astonishing how quickly the champions of humanity are provoked by very human forms of insurgency to make use of Jacobinical forma of oppression—except when the insurgency comes from trade unions.
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