Letters to the Editor
Doctors' Pay Angry Old.Practitioner Easter Morning Surgeon, Marjorie Strachey Hungarian Writers Paul Ignotus Qat Sir Gerald Reece 'The Brain-Washers' Ilcra, Prof. H. J. Eysenck The Angry Young Man Gabriel Fallon,-Robert Hancock 'Brains Trust' Ratings George Campey Anglo-Saxon Platitudes Burns Singer Bond and Free Rev. J. N. F. Earle
DOCTORS' PAY
SIR,—Perhaps a portrayal of the impact of the National Health Service on a typical practice in a . small country town will explain why there are a number of very Angry Older Men among doctors. In 1948 I was able to employ an assistant and despite paying him £1,000 per annum I could afford to spend a reasonable amount on the recreation which his employment made me free to enjoy, in- cluding an annual holiday with my wife. I was also able to pay a cook-housekeeper to help my wife in the running of this large Georgian house, a _delight to the eye of John Betjeman, but expensive to run and to maintain. Three of our children, now grown up, were at boarding-school, but I could find their fees without feeling that! must stop my cigarettes and whisky. During the years since the Danckwerts Award the profits derived from the practice have averaged just over £1,600 per annum. Three hundred and fifty pounds of this goes in income tax, £100 in life and sickness insurance, £500 in school fees for two younger children. We have £650 left to feed us and clothe us, to provide amenities and amusements and the thousand and one oddments that go to living. The assistant, of course, has gone and is enjoying a very much better lixelihood in the Antipodes than I can earn here. The cook-house- keeper had to go, never to be replaced. Holidays are obtained by sponging on friends at very long intervals. I feel guilty every time I have a smoke or drink.
It would be foolish to argue that other groups are not worse off, but the knowledge that that is so does nothing to lessen the sense of betrayal. When a brilliant and forceful politician bulldozed us into the service he gave us his personal assurance that our standard of living would not be lowered if we accepted remuneration from Government sources. The foolish men who did the negotiating on our behalf believed that they had obtained a contractual obligation to that effect binding on him and on his successors in office and on this basis advised us to surrender our freedom.
Again, it was agreed that we should be paid com- pensation for the loss of the right to sell the goodwill of our practices, but none of this money was to be paid over, except in cases .of proven hardship, until our death or retirement. That was in 1948. What is the proportionate value of that money now in terms of purchasing power? Is not the withholding of it a piece of unvarnished expropriation? I am now in my middle fifties. I see no chance whatever of being able to retire for another fifteen years. Will the £4,000 owing to me be worth more than a quarter , Miss Rebecca West has asked us to point out that contrary to what Mr. Graham Greene wrote in a letter a fortnight ago no action for libel has ever been brought against her by Mr. Evelyn Waugh.
of its original value by then? It is true that I am paid 24 per cent., subject to income tax, as interest. Does any other Government security standing at par bear such a low rate?
We feel that We have been betrayed and despoiled with a cynical disregard for good faith. The sop thrown to us now works out' at a 'rise' of rather less than one-half of I per cent. on our net remunera- tion for each of the years since that for which the Danckwerts Tribunal decided that it was fair and appropriate.
One's feelings are not assuaged by the thought that we have been grossly badly led or by the belief that our leaders are now committing the culminating stupidity in refusing to have anything to do with the Royal Commission. Just why they should think that many of us have sufficient confidence left in them to entrust our resignations to them I simply would not know.—Yours faithfully, ANGRY OLD PRACTITIONER
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