Demos: I afford you the benefit of the doubt that your remark about whinging was not intended to be against my post.

The short answer to this question is that no Government, Liberal, Labor, State or Federal has the intelligence, courage or will to undertake the brutal reforms needed to repair our health system.

The rot started waaaay back in the seventies when Gough Whitlam decided we had to have a "proper" socialist state-run medical system, a model which has been a money-eating inefficient monster everywhere it has been introduced. Pre-Gough, health insurance cost peanuts because almost everyone was a member. Once Medibank was introduced we quickly went down the British road of dropping private cover and clogging up emergency centres with the kind of minor ailments which should be dealt with by G.P.s.

I would bet that if you look at a pie graph of health spending you would find over half the money is wasted on administration. The only solution, and it would take a brave politician to do it, would be to completely destroy the Health bureaucracy. Get rid of all the chair-polishing pencil pushers at State and Federal level and their overpaid bosses and replace them with one central lean and mean administration. This would free up millions of dollars for the business end of health care, ie Doctors, Nurses and Hospitals.

It would work but it will never happen because most health decisions are made by the very bureaucrats whose gravy train would be derailed.