A National Health Service
A valuable contribution towards solving the problem of the health services is made in a report by the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Its recommendations are entirely in accord with the proposals of the Beveridge Report, which required the provision of medical treatment covering all requirements for all citizens through a national health service, whether paid for out of national insurance funds or directly by the taxpayer. The Medical Officers' report recommends a comprehensive national health service open to all free of charge, with doctors on a whole-time salaried basis. It comes appropriately from a society of medical men whose duties make them primarily interested in the prevention of sickness ; which should be, as it is not now, the main preoccupation of the medical profession. Under the scheme all members of the coth- munity will have the right to choose and call in salaried general practitioners free of charge, and will have access when necessary to specialists at health centres administered by the local authority, the centres being linked with municipal teaching-hospitals. For these purposes new and larger local government areas will have to be devised ; and at the top will be a new Health Ministry, co- ordinating all the health services, and concerned with that part of health administration which should be controlled nationally. The anomaly of voluntary hospitals making desperate appeals to the public for funds, and incapable of making adequate payments to their nurses, would disappear. We should have doctors interested in keeping people well ; the middle-classes, who are at present the chief victims of private medical enterprise, would share with the poor rights to treatment without exorbitant charges ; and the poor would have the standard of treatment levelled up by sharing a well-paid service. The rich could still go to their own doctor if they chose. The report comes from that body of medical men who, in this connexion, are the most completely distinterested.
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