Prepaid Doctoring

Three Milwaukee doctors last week went through the unpleasant experience of being ejected from their county organization, for a violation of professional ethics. Their sin: They took fees ($1 per month) from well people in return for which they promised to treat their illnesses if & when.

The American Medical Association has developed an acute case of nervous indigestion ever since depression knocked doctors off their economic feet. Few of the 200 and more schemes which doctors have invented to earn an honest dollar have sat well with A. M. A. None has proved more revolting to that potent national body than the prepayment plan which Milwaukee's Drs. John Edward Rueth, 46, Adam Lee Curtin, 49, and Herbert Carl Dallwig, 45, recently instituted.

The Milwaukee scheme is essentially the same as that profitably developed by Drs. Donald Edison Ross & Harry Clifford Loos in Los Angeles, Charles Dudley Saul in Philadelphia.

For $2 a month, paid in advance, clients of the Ross-Loos Clinic get any kind of doctoring or surgery they may require. This looks very much like the turnip of medical insurance and the beet of corporate medical practice, both of which nauseate the A. M. A. When Drs. Ross & Loos acquired 40,000 clients and a staff of 50 doctors, the A. M. A. expelled them. Subsequently lawyers forced the A. M. A. to take Drs. Ross & Loos back into the fold, on the technicality of an unfair trial.

The A. M. A. could not expel Dr. Saul because that rich homeopath is not a member. But A. M. A. members could try to prevent him from operating his Philadelphia prepaid medical service by having him cited as an unlicensed operator of an insurance scheme. Dr. Saul retaliated by having his two brothers, both potent Philadelphia lawyers, tweak the A. M. A. nose where it stuck into Pennsylvania business.

In Milwaukee Drs. Rueth, Curtin and Dallwig, expelled from the A. M. A. last week, hired a lawyer who bravely shouted: "They will resort to every means at their disposal to protect their standing as ethical practitioners."

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