So, the class war is alive and well in the halls of academe, it would seem.

"Australia has a vicious two-tiered health system. The affluent and powerful go as private patients... [the] poor and powerless... cannot purchase services privately"

That is the broadest of generalizations, and like all generalizations, is patently false.

According to a PHIAC/ATO/ABS analysis in 2006/7, nearly 3 million Australian adults with incomes lower than $40k were covered by Private Health Insurance. Also, the Australian Institute's 2005 report showed that 24% of Australians with household incomes of less than $25k were covered by Private Health Insurance. Sure, the percentage increases with disposable income, but so, I would imagine, does plasma TV ownership.

Most importantly though, given that a family can get good Private Health Insurance for around $1,500 p.a., the writer should take another look at his statement that:

"the poor and powerless... eat, smoke and drink more..."

A pack-a-day smoker chooses to spend around $5,000 p.a. on his habit. How, in the name of rationality, is this the fault of our health system?

Taking out Private Health Insurance is largely to do with personal, family priorities, not wealth. And the money is not removed from the overall health system - by allowing individuals to prioritize their health in this manner, the public system has less pressure on its waiting lists.

(Whisper it not abroad, of course, but private hospitals have a pretty good reputation for efficiency - after all, they are businesses, and businesses value efficiency.)

We have a good blend of public and private in Australia, with a first-rate public system that has a great track record for mending people - I would rather be run over in a Sydney street than almost anywhere else in the world (although some Scandinavian countries are pretty good too, I've heard).

I emphatically disagree with Mr Baume that he has shown that:

"What exists here is scarcely an indicator of a civil society. It is certainly not an indicator of a fair society. It is scarcely an indicator of a caring society."

Great sloganeering. Poor contact with reality.

Yet another whine from a rusted on leftie about how they would spend other people's money better than it is currently being spent. Especially if they had more of it.

And comments about how the poor and "powerless" drink and smoke more and practice less preventive measures are code for yet more nanny state intrusion. What he really means is he (or those who think like him) would really like to supervise how others spend their own money

People always talk about "our" such-and-such "system" when it's being run unsatisfactorily and irrationally by the government, don't they? No-one ever talks about "our" pizza "system", or our shirt system, or our friend system.

The author's complaints have nothing to do with the medical system per se. They have to do with the fact that poor people can't buy as much stuff as rich people. If this is immoral, then human freedom is immoral. Why not just strike to the root, and ban all freedom since people obviously can't be trusted, by their *voluntary* actions, to come up with outcomes that the clever know-it-alls would like to achieve by *force*?

But what is the alternative? Why should any inequality be tolerated? Why not simply make the tax rate 100% of everyone's product, and then government can redistribute income so everyone's income is equal? Bliss! But of course the author won't own up to his own ridiculous and anti-social logic.

It never occurs to him that government might have anything to do with causing the problems he is concerned about. That the overwhelming single cause of poverty is government, with its endless taxes, inflation, wars, bureaucracies parasitising productive activity, occupational licensing, and endless capital consumption, which the author is all in favour of.

In declaring anything he doesn't like as immoral, the author completely fails to deal with the fact that *everything* he stands for in this article is based on extortion. That doesn't rate a mention in his scheme or morality apparently.

What we have here is just a re-run of the nutty communist idea that inequality is intrinsically "not fair". The underlying idea is that the process of wealth creation is one by which everyone equally contributes to a common pool, and then mean and nasty people take unequally from it, while government - the monopoly of force and fraud - is the fountain of all that is good and productive. In short, a complete inversion of reality and morality

This sounds like Peter is feeling guilty. Guilty of having nestled in the larges of tax payer funded comfort all his life.

I wonder if he felt guilty when he sat in the seat of a director of Sydney water. Surely he would have thought, with his belief in fairness, that there was someone more qualified, who should be sitting in the seat.

As an old bloke, without health insurance, I don't think our health system is too bad. It's pulled me through 3 heart attacks pretty well. It hasn't done such a good job with a couple of other problems, but that's probably my fault for picking a problem that's hard to diagnose. It's not for lack of trying, that I've not been sorted.

Yes down here in the dirt, at ground level, it's not too bad. I don't doubt it would be much improved if a head hunter took the top 500 managers out of the system. Replace them with a hundred or so small business managers, & we'd get 10 times the value for money, but that goes for most public service areas.

Medical euthanasia

There is something rotten in the State of Tasmania and it could be the same in the othere states as well.
This is the transcript of Airlie Ward from the 7.30 report in Tasmania talking to the CEO of the Menzies center on his leaving to go to another position.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-04/professor-simon-foote-interview/3636862
In it, he virtually admits - that there is a time coming when patients who are dependent on the public health system will be assessed and if they are found to be not worth the cost, will be left. She actually remarks that this amounts to medical euthanasia.
His reply is, in my view, evasive. So it would seem that the ripping out of hundreds of millions of dollars from the health system, is a deliberate move to either force low income Tasmanians to join a health fund and take the burden from the State or to bring in a subtle form of eugenics.

Professor Simon Foote: “We can’t actually afford the level of service that many people sort of desire and over the next decade we are definitely going to be faced with more and more difficult decisions about whether to spend money on someone for a particular procedure or not and I think going into the future the answer to that question will often be not rather than yes.”
Airlie Ward: “Sounds like medical euthanasia?”
Professor Simon Foote: “Well it’s not necessarily euthanasia but it’s you know it’s , we are going to have a finite budget and we have to spend that budget wisely and we make those decisions already you know, for example there are drugs that we don’t actually have access to in Austalia because they are too expensive, so those decisions are at one level or another already being made, I just think we will see them being made more frequently in the future.”

Congratulations. This is a short and incisive analysis of our illness industry. The only bits you need to add is how the professions are siloed and work against other and the woeful quality of health bureaucrats who are more interested in their careers than making decisions to benefit patients.