Doctors and the Salary
With the period before July 5th, when the National Health Service Act comes into force, growing steadily shorter the continuance of the deadlock between the doctors and the Government becomes proportionately more serious. But no change can be expected in the situation till the special representative meeting of the B.M.A. has been held on March r7th. The purpose of the meeting is to consider the result of the recent plebiscite, and there can be no doubt that the uncompromising opposition there indicated to the Act in its present form will be decisively reaffirmed. More and more the doctors' opposition is centring on the question of a salaried service, to which most general practitioners remain invincibly opposed—though thousands of other doctors are in fact serving various public bodies on a salaried basis. Whether this attitude is reasonable or unreasonable is beside the point. What matters is that it is a solid fact. Is there anything in the conception of a national health service which makes it essential that a salary, basic or full-time, should figure in it ? The answer must be that there is nothing. There are arguments in favour of the proposed £3oo, and if a guarantee is given that the amount will not be varied except by a decision of Parliament the doctors would be wise to accept it. But rather than let the basic salary form a fatal obstacle to agree- ment it should be dropped without hesitation.
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