By the end of 1959, the medical profession, represented by the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons, had come to believe that Douglas would constantly shift on agreements until he and his civil servants had obtained the result they’d had in mind from the beginning. In the last months of that year and throughout 1960, the College also had to take into account the maneuvers of the federal CCF party, which might affect any agreements made with the CCF provincial government. For example, although Douglas had insisted that fee for service could be maintained in his medical plan, on October 26th of 1959, the ReginaLeader-Post reported that M. J. Coldwell, then national leader of the party, had repudiated that position while speaking at a nominating meeting in Saskatchewan:

M. J. Coldwell called in unequivocal language for the implementation of a socialized medical scheme in Saskatchewan… Mr. Coldwell said that the great advances in medical science are being made by doctors working in teaching institutions on a salaried basis rather than those in private practice.

Since Coldwell was already in the province to speak at meetings held in preparation for the 1960 provincial election, his comments had to raise suspicions that not even the Premier’s undertaking to preserve fee for service could be trusted.

Coldwell’s visit gave doctors other reasons to distrust the CCF. The same report in theLeader-Post showed him trying to paint the medical profession as exploiting the people it served:“Some medical people have been making high fees out of the sickness of the people of this country and of this province,” he declared. A study of the province’s fee schedule would soon have laid that charge to rest. No patient of mine, even the most diehard supporter of the CCF, ever gave me an example of a doctor who’d charged anyone, let alone the poor, an exorbitant fee, and although at the time I knew almost all the doctors in Saskatoon and many in Regina, Moose Jaw, and Prince Albert, I knew of only one who might be described as rich—and then only by virtue of his non-medical wife’s inherited fortune. Doctors certainly had better annual incomes than the average Saskatchewan farmer, but on the other hand, few of them had accumulated capital resources comparable even to a small farm’s land holdings.

Another version of the CCF’s“rich doctor” theme held that the profession’s opposition to state medical insurance schemes arose