It’s disturbing the way some socialists dismiss opponents as advocating “every man should be an island”. Most of us are not saying that at all. I am saying that we need to put freedom and choice back into the equation, and to do that we need to get the government out of our lives - the health system being a case in point.

The reason it is a “rather dysfunctional disease treatment system” is because it’s a centrally-planned bureaucracy attempting the impossible – trying to prove that governments and bureaucrats can perform better than businesses competing for customers in a free market. In the absence of feedback from shareholders and customers it’s impossible to optimise the millions of decisions that need to be made, particularly given that the government simply takes the funds it needs. Imagine if you could run your business that way.

Advocating even more regulation to try and determine genuine need doesn’t solve anything – it still boils down to subjective opinion administered by a bureaucracy, making it even more inefficient and money-wasting.

I can’t understand why many contributors to this forum are so resistant to the simple idea of letting each of us be guided by experiencing the consequences of our own actions. If we smoke, we get lung cancer. If we want to be treated, we save or borrow the money needed. If we want to secure ourself against illness, we take out insurance.

Is it because they all are on the winning side of the socialist bargain?

How is it okay to demand instead of user pays, someone else pays? What is wrong with a simple, self-regulating system that doesn’t require an army of bureaucrats?

Theft is an appropriate word to describe the way the government takes what it needs for its ever-expanding operations and dishes it out to favoured groups. It is certainly not the basis on which we can form a just society, because it places the government above the law that applies to those whom it is supposed to serve.

In 1935 doctors in Victorian doctors banded together to form HBA. The doctors started HBA as a health insurance organisation so that their patients would pay them for treatment. HBA was set up as a doctor's income protection scheme. I have no quibble with that.

HBA is now owned by AXA - a French insurance company.

Clearly I would be seriously annoyed if Medibank Private was sold off. I am told that the health insurance premiums are set so that the smaller insurance funds can survive. I would like real competition, health funds free to set contributions low enough to weed out the inefficient. Unlike the system of government regulation that has existed for 25 years.

And why should children's access to health care be dependent on the wealth of their parents?

Winston Smith should work in the United States for a year then tell us what he thinks.

Winston Smith: "... we need to get the government out of our lives - the health system being a case in point."

Like the US system...

Princeton economist Paul Krugman writes (NYTimes, Nov 14 2005):

"I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did...

"That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it."

Why?

"... good insurance is hard to come by, because private markets for health insurance suffer from a severe case of the economic problem known as "adverse selection," in which bad risks drive out good.

"... insurance companies don't offer a standard health insurance policy, available to anyone willing to buy it. Instead, they devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.

"This... is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most."

Krugman also pointed out in a column a few weeks later that the most efficient and highest rated supplier of health care in the US is the federal government Veterans' Health Administration.

"the lesson," he wrote," of the V.H.A.'s success story — that a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector — runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today's Washington."

Medicare is "user pays concept", we pay the Medicare levy, we expect to get a service for money paid, a simple concept really to most of us, except Winston of course, for whom everything is a communist plot.

If the Howard Government claim there is not enough money to provide a great service, simply raise the Medicare levy by .5% and get on with it, for some of us it is a life or death experience, perhaps that suits a purpose, is there something we should know?

During the last ten years the Howard administration has tried all types of incentive and coercive tactics to steer people into private health funds. To name a few he has raised the medicare levy for those who wish to opt out of private health, then came the lifetime cover campaign and the ridiculous thirty percent rebate. Despite all this the take up is still only a miserable forty two percent and then primarily skewed to the older populace. I have no problem personally with private ownership of services but in this case the likes of Howard, Winston Smith and co just don't get it. The majority aren't interested in private health cover in the current form.

The dismal performance in public health is mostly blamed on incumbent state governments but this argument looks rather flimsy when one considers the fact that all states and territories have sufferred an ailing health system for years. The federal government has alot to answer for since they continue to flog the traditional worker unions but fail to take on the two most powerful unions in the country, namely the AMA and the college of surgeons. The plain stupid vote buying thirty percent rebate has not achieved it's purpose of cost support to the consumer but instead, like all other subsidies has only fuelled massive price hikes in fees by placing further demands upon a supply constrained product. The price rise being about equal to the value of the original subsidy. Over the last few years this appalling waste of about three billion dollars annually could have easily funded over one thousand acute care beds in our public hospital system, virtually wiping out the waiting lists in one fell swoop.

Medicare might have it's warts, but run properly it could not possibly be worse than what we have now.

Make anything free and your supply system will collapse from too much demand.People will use it not out of need or necessity,but because they can.Try it.Make hot dogs free at you school canteen.People will gorge themselves until they're ill,just to prove a point and the same has happened to our medical system,only those in real need are missing out.

Increase the pension and make all pay $5.00 for a visit to the GP and those with chronic illness be exempted.Do likewise for the rest of the country and the demand will fall.Get people to explore alternative medicines that work and encourage healthy lifestyles.We all have to be more responsible for our own health since we will all go broke eventually, trying to extend our lives on the borrowed time of past decadence and irresponsible actions.

Nothing is free because we even have to make some effort to breathe the air that sustains us.