Spot on Jeremy.

There is a problem tho - for many Australians, Medicare is considered a right which must be maintained at any cost, and the notion that it's unfeasable will be heresy to many.

It's time for Australia to grow up and face reality.

"The "free and universal"' taxpayer-funded health systems of the twentieth century were created in an age when medicine was rudimentary and inexpensive,"

The reason we are told that governments collect taxes, is to pay for things like schools, hospitals and roads etc. So if our health care is funded through taxation.

How can it be 'free'?

admittedly governments would like to spend our taxation dollars on things other than the reasons wea re told that they are collected for.

To loose our medi-care arrangements and follow a model similar to the United states which, by the way is the same model of health care in third world countries. This model is that if you can afford to pay for your own health care then you do, if you cant afford to pay for health care then your life expectancy rate is dramactically reduced.

Medi-care is a luxury we can not afford to loose, because the alternative especially for many retiree's is that health care cost similar to the US do not take long to bleed a retirement fund dry.

Unfortunately for us Australians there is no Canadian or Mexican boarder to cross to buy the exact same medicines at half the price paid for in the US.

There are perhaps many times that the medi-care dollars have been poorly directed by those in power.

Perhaps if our government stopped spending money on committing Australia to wars started by the US we would have the requisite money to spend on health.

The nonsense coming out of the CIS these days is getting more and more absurd and desperate. I can only hope it's because they can see that people are waking up to the reality of what neoliberal free market fundamentalism is - little more than an extreme ideology with very little evidence to back it up. Healthcare in particular is one area where the evidence overwhelmingly points to it being far more efficiently and reasonably provided by a single taxpayer-funded system than by competing private insurance funds.
There're many areas needing improvement in our health system, but making access to life-saving treatments and drugs dependent on ability to pay for them is categorically not one of them. Fortunately it could never be sold to the voting public anyway.

dnicholson, you've missed the point entirely.

Most of the medicines that will be used in the future are being developed overseas. That means that we'll need to purchase them which is a cost the government will need to bear. As each year passes, these new drugs and therapies are becoming more and more expensive.

This is reality.

The article is right in saying that purchasing these drugs (etc) and giving them to everyone carte blanche will require sums of money which are unrealistic - would you like to have a lowest tax bracket of 50% working up to 90% (or more) to pay for this alone?

The reality we all face is that we have an aging population and a shrinking tax base. There will come a time in the near future where the health system that we currently "enjoy" will no longer be feasable.

It's nothing to do with right-wing-ism - it's the practical ramification of our world.

No mention of how oil decline will make healthcare as we know it just a pleasant memory. But the news need not all be bad. Cubans now have a longer life expectancy than US citizens as well as universal health care but at a fraction of the energy cost. There is a lot we could learn from them.