Article March 24, 1917 Issue

Opportunity for propaganda is being made of the commission...

Los Angeles (Cal.) Graphic

Opportunity for propaganda is being made of the commission appointed by the state legislature to examine into the various aspects of health insurance by those who are desirous of a socialization of medical practice, and if Californians don't watch out the doctors will surely "git" them. This propaganda desires "to make the public understand the necessity of frequent examinations, the value of supervision rather than mere treatment;" and "if the people at large could be interested in the matter sufficiently to make them act at all, they would probably make the organization complete and arrive with one leap at state medicine." There you have it. You are going to be doctored whether you will or no.

Now, we are familiar with the socialist argument that as all the people in a state maintain all the doctors in the state in order to cure them when they are sick, they might as well pay those doctors through the state to prevent people from sickness, and indeed give them a bonus on a reduced death rate. That is excellent in theory, but some medical men we know, having regard to the acknowledgedly inexact state of their science, are candid enough to say, "Heaven forbid that we doctors be given compulsory powers over private citizens."

It may be true, just as the more crime there is the more prosperous are the police, that the more sickness there is the more healthy it is for the doctor's bank-roll; but there is at present not sufficient evidence that the medical men know enough about disease and the ways of curing it to justify their endowment with compulsory powers. Bernard Shaw, for instance, who is for state compulsion in all sorts of things, tried in his "Doctor's Dilemma" to make out that even with the great advances in medical knowledge practitioners are yet but a sorry set of bunglers, forgetting that if he is logical in his state socialism he must nevertheless compulsorily hand himself and the bodies of his fellow citizens over to the empirical care of these same "bunglers."

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