I will be very blunt, neither Labor or the Liberal governments want a public health care system. They would much prefer to spend that money on other things.

There has been a concerted push to encourage Australians to take out private health insurance and too push us towards an American Health care system.

Publicly governments may say that they support our Public Hospital system, yet covertly, only bandaid solutions are applied. Like a magicans slight of hand, money appears to be put into the system, yet that money is moved from one area to another.

The lack of funding and development of more public hospital beds at the time of an increasing population, means that much more pressure would be put on our existing public hospital sector.

So Governments by decreasing the availabitity of public hospital beds, increases waiting times, hopefully putting pressure on the public to move to the private sector, if they want timely treatment.

Our politicians including our Prime Minister make a song and dance about under performing public hospitals.

Yet it must be remember it is the Doctors who admit, treat and discharge patients.

Public hospitals are caught between a rock and a hard place, between treating patients and being able to stay within their budgets.

If you need to see a doctor today, there are very few GPs that take on new patients, and very few that have same day appointments available.
This is a problem for anybody who has a serious health condition, because while the presenting problem itself may not be that serious, the impact of numerous health issues makes this serious.
The people who are able to get same day appointments are not those with serious health conditions, they are those that can afford to pay. Since they can get an appointment, and the irritating cough is cleared up in no time, they never glimpse what happens if that same cough occurs in a much more vulnerable patient who, the next day, ends up in hospital.
This hospitalisation could have been avoided. A bed is now taken up by a patient who should have been able to stay at home, and someone else's surgery is cancelled. And so on.
How could this be different?
The patient could have gone to another doctor, but the last thing people with serious health conditions need is their records spread across a multiplicity of doctors; the situation with radiology and pathology is bad enough.
They could go to a clinic that has more availability, but the number of appointments required (often to document the condition to government agencies) makes the cost of healthcare too high.
We operate under the assumption that if we take those who can pay out of the public system, the public system can work better for those who can't. It doesn't. If we took those who have high needs out, and asked private doctors to take their fair share of the difficult cases, they would get the care they need, and free up the health system for the masses.

Further, inadequate health care is not simply symptomatic of inequality, it causes inequality. When the entire working week is consumed with attempting to access health care for a loved one with a serious health condition, it is impossible to work. This can push the entire household onto welfare. For those who can afford private healthcare, appointments can be made to facilitate ongoing work commitments, the public system is predicated on the assumption that anybody with significant health issues, and the carers needed to assist them, are available at any time, for long periods of time. Working families need extended hours clinics, and many many more GPs available. They need to be able to transport radiology and pathology results, rather than have to repeat them, and they need to be able to access appointments in clinics that run on time, and do not require a 3 hour wait.

Dr Woodruff, thank you for this article which opens out the vast problems of poverty and inadequacies of our health care systems. Together these cause high numbers of premature deaths, almost all unknown and unquantified; esentially unquantifiable, as to complete life and health background.

The death rate for all humans is 100%. "Mortality rate" has statistical meaning when used to describe deaths from disease and traumas per 100,000. For example, such statistics might, but cannot, state "The mortality rate for rich people with bowel cancer is 12% and the mortality rate for poor people with bowel cancer is 30%".

What most specifically describe the problems of poverty and lack of health care are life expectancy rates. The life expectancy rate of Australians is now 81.6 years. Our most vulnerable and neglected Australians are about 100,000 remote Indigenous people (mentioned by you) and some 600,000 severely mentally ill (those with bipolar 1, schizophrenia, and severe affective disorders). Life expectancy for both these groups is 55-58 years, almost a third years fewer than the 81 years of almost all other Australians.

These figures offer an horrific story of preventable premature deaths in Australia and illustrate your article's theme.

Life is not fair,

if it were "fair", all the people who presently vote liberal would vote labor.....

but as it is in an unfair world, where people are free to choose, some will choose wisely and others foolishly.

Community needs and interests will always be subordinate to individual needs and interests

and health care is there to service the needs of the individuals who need it, not the community which pays for it

Healthcare it is not some icon of universal fairness and egalitarianism.....

we all have different genes and

we all have different life styles -

and those are just two of the many factors which will determine what we will ultimately need from the health care services our taxes are supposed to pay for.

In short, it is impossible to make "fairness" the outcome when all the inputs suffer individual "diverity"

So I suggest get real,

get over it and accept

the world is not a fair place

The main problem with most healthcare consumers these days is that they expect to get all their healthcare needs met for 'free'.

They will flood the few GP surgeries that bulk bill patients, and then complain about long waiting times, or they will go to their local hospital with non-emergency problems and still complain about long waiting times.

Will they expect not to pay their vet for their dogs injections? No.
Will they refuse to pay for the chiropractor to ease their back pain? No.
Will they give up their expensive smokes or alcohol weekly? No.
Will they stop going for that 'cheap' holiday to Bali every year, or update their TV size so they can afford to pay to see GP's? No.

While there is free public hospital treatment in this country for anyone to use, then there will continue to be problems in the public health system.

If only the patients on healthcare cards were allowed to use free public hospital treatment, I doubt all the others would bother going to public hospitals for non-emergency treatment.

This would free up hospital resources and staff to attend to the emergency and elective surgery patients they were meant to concentrate on, instead of attending to the ear-aches and colds suffered by patients who could afford to see GP's.

The best solution is to turn the doctors back into a regulated wages working class, or in other words put them all back on MediCare, which is clearly in the best interests of the majority of people.

When the majority of Australians realise that neither of the 2 major parties truly represent their best interests, then they will vote for someone else who will regulate the drs and lawyers.

Simply, the problem with the health sector is that drs are free to make up there own prices.

I say no to the privatisation, no to fat cats, shareholders and every other irrelevant parasite bleeding the Australian population, with the only exception to that being the individuals who really do have in their hands hot and in demand international grade goods and services and who are adding to the nation's wealth through exports.

Those people are to be rewarded but as for the rest of them, mere functionaries I say which must be regulated if medicine is to be sustainable.

One of the principal problems with the Australian economy is that far too many people are paid far too much to do far too little and consequently access to the law and medicine are not rights but largely privileges of the rich.