"The adoption of private sector methods, including greater involvement of private operators in the delivery of public health service, should be encouraged to enhance productivity and improve access to quality hospital services at the least cost."

This statement is clearly delusional at the least.

All experiments in Australia with the idea of privatising hospitals or hospital management have meet with increased costs.

The greatest example of the failure of alleged market forces, one only needs to look at the country that adopted this approach to the full and that is the United States.

A country that has the highest health care costs in the world, yet only manages to cover somewhere between 60-70% of the population and just because you have health cover insurances does not necessarily mean that you will be covered for health care costs.

The private American health system ranks around 33 in health outcomes.
So there are at least 32 countries who spend significantly less on health than the states, and still achieve better health outcomes.

Private systems make a profit because they deny care to unprofitable patients. So they are not burdened by costly patients.

We also forget the enormous cost of IT for hospitals or the increasing percentage of indirect costs.

Research also show that the greatest patient costs occur within the first 48-72 hours of admission.

It doesn't take blind freddy to understand the shorter the stay, the more patients that are churned through within that time frame, the higher the costs are going to be.

Over the last three decades, the number of available public hospital beds have decreased by more than 50%.

John Howard introduced carrot and the whip inducements to encourage people to take out private health insurance in the extremely unsubstantsiated claim that it would take the pressure off of public hospitals.

But in reality private health insurance is more about syphoning money out of peoples wallets and into the pockets of CEO's and big share holders.

"The adoption of private sector methods, including greater involvement of private operators in the delivery of public health service, should be encouraged to enhance productivity and improve access to quality hospital services at the least cost."

Lets look at some of the private sector methods.

Take for example cardio thoracic surgery.

In the public system a swan ganz catheter is only inserted if it is clinically indicated for the patient management. Public cardio thoracic surgery patients are usually transferred to the general post op ward the following day if they are clinically stable.

Under the private system, every private cardio thoracic patient will get a swan ganz catheter regardless of clinical need.

They will stay in the private hospitals intensive care unit for as long as their private health fund will pay, usually between 3-5 days.

The renal physians of private hospital dialysis units, have to see every private patient, each and every dialysis session. regardless whether that renal dialysis patient needs to see a doctor or not.

So a daily walk around a private hospitals dialysis unit, for a private hospital renal physian can earn between two to three thousand dollars a day.

The real truth is that the Private sector looks for ways and means of increasing profitability. The only productivity that it enhances is that of profitability.

Over the last decade public hospital admission and treatment rates have increased by 30%. That is a productivity increase of 30%.

In addition, the private sector methods used in the Private sector hospital system of the United States, there are workers who are so poorly paid they need to have a second job to make ends meet.

Does employing workers for less than the average wage mean cheaper hospitals?

It definitely does not.

In a recent case nurses were asked to take a pay cut, but this pay cut for nurses was to fund exorbitant contracts offered to medicos and others.
http://www.impactednurse.com/?p=2827

Recently many of the state owned assests of power, gas and electricity have been privatised with what we were told would be greater effiencencies, cheaper prices etc.

It now turns out the only real effeciency these private companies have, is the way they are jacking up prices and using what is called gold plating the network, undertaking expensive upgrades whether they are need or not, so prices can be jacked up on the consumer.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/goldplating-the-power-grid-20120705-21iv5.html

"John Howard introduced carrot and the whip inducements to encourage people to take out private health insurance..."

What carrot? It was a whip or an even bigger whip, and hasn't it worked magnificently?

Perhaps the effective implementation of Public Health should be seen as a social necessity rather than some sort of needless expense or a source of profit.

Over the years there has been a compounding effect from the negative consequences of the policies from both Labor and Liberal governments.

Can the problems with the public hospital system be fixed?

Yes they can, however there is a qualification to this.

There are many stake holders who benefit from the chaos and the status quo, so they are going to do their very best to make sure things do not change.

Ian Miller at Impacted Nurse points out exactly how the excutive tries to deal with problems

<It might have all been worth something if a politician or member of health directorate executive had said: well hang on here, the environment of access block and emergency department overcrowding is far worse than we have been led to believe. There is some bad %*#! going down here. This is not an emergency department problem, this is a hospital wide problem. Our first priority must be to apply expert resources to immediately ease this situation. And then re-evaluate what we are doing to ameliorate it.
Because we are well aware of its adverse impact on patient care.

<Remember: There is very strong evidence now that increased length of stay in our emergency departments leads to increased morbidity and mortality amongst these patients. At the very least is has a direct impact on quality of patient care. So this is no small matter.>

<Instead, the distraction placed on executive right now seems to be directed towards data security, password protection re-evaluating the inaccurate data1. Cleaning up the political fallout. Damage control.>

http://www.impactednurse.com/?p=4561

A very tiny increase in the medicare levy, would have a substantial increase in medicare funding.