The Reluctant Britons

For two weeks mail sacks crammed with ballots had been lugged into the red brick headquarters of the British Medical Association in Bloomsbury's Tavistock Square. A blue-uniformed B.M.A. porter guarded the doors to the room where clerks (sworn to secrecy) counted the answers. The ballots were replies to a question sent to 55,842 B.M.A. members: Would Britain's doctors be willing to serve under the new National Health Service Act backed by Health Minister Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan?

The answer appeared to be an emphatic no. Last week the B.M.A. jubilantly announced that the results were "not so much a landslide as an avalanche" against Bevan. The vote: 40,814 against, 4,735 in favor.

The vote meant that British doctors, already patella-deep in socialized medicine, were not enthusiastic about getting in up to their necks. At present, 17,000 of Britain's 21,000 general practitioners serve under a "panel" system started by Lloyd George in 1911. The system covers 19,500,000 low-income workers who pay 40-c- a week (their employers an equal amount) for medical care, sickness insurance and pension fund. The doctors, who get about $3 a year for each patient on their panel, may also engage in private practice. The doctors get their steady, bread-&-butter incomes (40% on the average) from the panel; the jam comes from private patients.

Bevan's new health scheme, scheduled to go into effect July 5, is a huge expansion of the panel. All of Britain's 48,000,000 men, women & children (Northern Ireland has a separate plan) will be included; payments by workers will be more than doubled.

The doctors have many objections to the new act. Basically, they fear complete state control of medicine. And the doctors do not trust Bevan. In medical terms, he is a "corrected sinistral": left-handed as a child, he developed a stammer when elders forced him to be righthanded. He cured the stammer, relapses only when he is excited; but the doctors think that his politics move steadily leftward.

In spite of the no-confidence vote, Bevan was still confident that he had a good chance of corralling enough doctors to make the scheme work on schedule. He holds a powerful pounds & pence goad: the panel system ends July 5 and is superseded by the new act. Doctors will miss its steady income. They will still be free to practice privately, but they will have trouble finding many Britons willing to pay extra.

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