THE DANISH MODEL (2)

The family doctors are playing hardball in their dispute with the regions. Although the Government has intervened and extended the existing contract for a year from 1 September, the doctors are having none of it. Their union is urging its members to return their public sector licences on 31 August, and practice thereafter as fully independent physicians, charging patients as American doctors do. It would then be up to patients to winkle a refund out of the state.

This hard-nosed stance is overwhelmingly supported by the doctors themselves. Meetings are taking place in each of the five regions to discuss strategy. In the three that have met so far, support for the policy was 96.1%, 95.7% and 90.6% respectively. Basically the doctors are united in their opposition to the proposed reforms.

Faced with this intransigence, the regions are fighting back. It's not certain that patients would be refunded 100% of their costs, they say, we would have to look at them carefully (a non-committal way to sow doubt amongst the general public). Furthermore, once the dispute is over - as, like with the teachers, it eventually will be - it is not certain that licences would be distributed geographically as they were before. More licences would be issued to areas that currently lack doctors; fewer where there are many. In other words, some doctors not prepared to move would end up losing their income from the state. In Denmark, that would, in effect, mean losing their livelihood.

Some of this is skirmishing, but the crux of the matter is that, as with teachers' working hours, this is a fundamental difference of view. Since it is the state that ultimately pays for family doctors, and since it is the state that controls the legislative process, I predict that is is the state that will eventually decide the outcome. But it will be another blow to the famed Danish model of labour relations.

Walter Blotscher