Health what health. We all know this whole plan has been a load of rubbish and nothing will change in health. It is the management of hospitals that must change. Nurses work in difficult conditions with a work load that is unreasonable, there are no where near enough doctors and the hospitals are either too small or to old. To make it worse the administration is so unbelievably incompetent that they can not even devise an admissions system that allows the accident and emergency to clear patients to a ward in under 6 hours. The problem across the country is resources, staff and incompetent administration always has been always will be.

Lets first get rid of this rubbish that all medical staff are pillars of virtue.

When my 90+ year old mother was in a large QLD hospital recently the weekend staff had not noticed that her food had to be cut up & fed to her. When I found her on Sunday evening, her lunch, & dinner were both sitting untouched, & she was inconherent.

She had not eaten for 40 hours, & had not been given any of the modified water, [& no other drink of any kind] for 30 hours.

After my explosion, they had to give her 2 units of blood, & a saline drip for 30 hours, to get her able to even sit up.

As for the rest of the article, it depends on some strange idea that the commonwealth government can run something better than the state government. Granted the state lot are bl00dy hopeless, I have still to see any evidence that the national lot are not worse, in fact everything they have done recently tends to give this indication.

Given that the very same people will pretend to do the job, after the take over, I can see only a cash/power grab by that incompetent control freak, Rudd.

May god protect the sick.

Do you think elective waiting time will ever become extinct.
The more you do the more that will have to be done.
The more the cost of med ins will rise.
There is no waiting time for emergencies.

There is no waiting time for getting a tooth pulled out with severe pain.
Those waiting for dental should be saving up while they are waiting and pay for it them self.

JamesH
> "[Abolishing government intervention in health care services] would see the price and cost of health care in this country skyrocket … "

Where do you think the government is getting the money from to subsidise health care prices to keep them lower than the market price? A moonbeam?

You are only demonstrating that you are confused by smoke and mirrors. Pouring money through a government bureaucracy doesn’t reduce costs, it increases them, and hides the extra charge in your tax bill so naive people like you think they’re getting something for nothing.

The government can’t even install pink batts for free without killing people, burning down houses, and wasting billions of dollars. What makes you think they are being any more efficient in running hospitals, licensing medical schools, and regulating medicines?

Hasbeen (Sat 24 April 10:25:33 AM) and suzeonline (Sat 24 April 12:21:12 AM) make good points.

So much incompetence and inefficiency is generated by the dumb actions of a few dumb or incompetent people - individually or collectively (viz. the cost of 2 units of blood and some i/v fluids vs some oral food and water).

The level of health care in Australia is second-to-none. The only negatives are things like Hasbeen's and suzeonline's examples above; and, a bloated inefficient bureaucracy which well get worse with Rudd's Dudd plan, and which will eat up the extra funds; the lack of acute mental health options; and, the obesity epidemic.

What I’m having great difficulty with is trying to understand how any of this “reform” actually works. I’ve read just about everything that has been published and I still don’t get it.

Not one journalist has been able to explain “how”, they only talk about “what”. Even the flow chart graphic in the Australian addressed only the transfer of funding responsibility and the additional administrative layers.

The constant references to “beds” and “efficiency” tell us little. Beds are a composite of the ward to put them in, the technology to support them, the nurses, doctors, technicians, pharmacies, lab facilities and so on.

Efficiency is I suppose about more effective use of existing beds, increased throughput. But hospital beds are also used by aged and mentally ill, which is now a federal responsibly. Does the federal government now pay for the use of these beds or are they going to provide new beds, outside our hospital system for aged and mental patients? How will this be administered, how will decisions in progress be reduced by more administrative layers, who has the authority to make decisions and who is accountable for what?

If the funding responsibility ratio has changed, who gets to decide how each funding source is separated, allocated and accounted for? How will duplication and conflict over resources be eliminated?

Nowhere have I seen a definition of any actual problems, just generalizations about more doctors, beds, nurses, waiting lists, crisis and squishy comments about efficiency.

I’ve lived and worked in many western and third world countries. My personal experience has been that Australia’s Healthcare system is light years ahead of the next best. Is it possible that healthcare reform is based upon a false or exaggerated premise for political gain?

Does anyone have any answers or are we all in the same boat, in the dark and no paddle?