Nicola, Mr Rudd’s health policy is inchoate. Mr Rudd is on record as saying that the states have a couple of years to fix things and failing that he’ll step in and assume control of all hospitals with the concomitant reduction of GST paid to the states. Are we to believe that the states will accept a reduction in GST? I’d like to see that.

Our politicians don't have a solution to our hospital woes. What are we to make of all those o'seas fact-finding-missions? It looks like health facts are very hard to find.

I couldn't understand what Labor's health policy is from this article but I do know that Howard is committed to selling Medibank Private after the election and moving to user pays health care.

It's disingeneous of federal politicians to blame state governments for failing to spend money on health care or education because state governments have been starved of funds. Since 1996 although taxes as a proportion of GDP has risen, the states share has fallen from 7% of GDP to 5% of GDP.

John Roskam, of the IPA, Liberal thinktank, has an article in The Age that suggests that under a Labor government Victorian hospitals would lose funding. http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/under-federal-control-all-hospitals-would-have-to-compete/2007/08/28/1188067108369.html

Nicola, the ALP has no hospital fix up plan. To have a plan requires commitments of dollars, staff, changed process and procedures for managing the hospitals.
The ALP so far has $700,000 per hospital and a commitment of a meeting in 2 years to see how it's going. Let's see, that would buy about 5 medical staff for 1 year and nobody left to attend the meeting a further year out.

Like so many of the ALP "promises" this is no more than a commitment to have some meetings after the election to determine if anything is ever going to be done. Exactly the way labor manages it's various crises in NSW.

About 14 years ago a newspaper article which said that Public Hospital spending needed to be increased, not decreased. Public Hospital budgets needed to be increased to take into account, increased technology, inflation, wage and salary and an ageing population.

Paul Keating was Prime Minister, and economic reform was introduced. It became a catch cry for Public Hospitals in Australia of improved efficiencies, improved performance and cost effectiveness.

Whilst other public service departments at least had their budgets increased by the CPI. The budgets for health were increased at a rate lower than the CPI.

The numbers of available public hospital beds have decreased, and perhaps the decrease is much greater considering how bed availablity is calculated was changed. Rather sneakily day surgery beds and chairs have been added to calculations.

The GP super clinic sound grand, except for one thing they are not going to make one iota of difference to the patients waiting in emergency departments for a public hospital bed and it is doubtful if they will make any difference to the other patients who spend hours in emergency departments waiting to see a doctor.

For more than a decade each government has come out with it's own grand sounding plan to fix health and things just keep getting worse.

Sure with a population of only 21 million it seems to be idiotic to have two levels of government dealing with the health care system.

To fix our public hospital system will take time and even if an extra 50 billion was available tommorrow, it will still take at least 5 years.

Why?

Because the two resources needed are not there. That is beds and staff to staff those beds. It take time to build more hospitals and to train more staff.

And that is going to take buckets of money, because of decades of poor planning it is going to cost a lot more and provided the extra money is not creamed off the top by the bureacrats.

It is disappointing that so many people have felt able to comment on the ALP health policy without reading it. In fact, there is very little in the Plan which is at all contentious. The changes proposed are strongly in line with the submissions of the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance to COAG and address the most obvious problems. The cost of public hospitals, of medical technology and pharmaceuticals is becoming unsustainable. Numbers of doctors and nurses are already far below what is needed except in the most affluent teaching and research hospitals. The shortages will get very much worse before they can begin to improve. Therefore, means must be found to reduce the pressures on acute care. We must rather begin to ask: what must we do to keep people well?

The solution, already being applied in many comparable countries such as Canada and New Zealand, is to fund multi-disciplinary primary health care centres, each servicing a population catchment area of 80,000-100,000 people, open 24/7. These “integrated care centres” to use the Tasmanian term, would be staffed by GPs, nurse practitioners, and a full range of other health professionals - physios, OTs, podiatrists, mental health and dental therapists - all working to prevent simple problems becoming complex and requiring acute care. These Centres will be the source of health education and preventive programs in their community. They will take a great deal of the load from Emergency Departments of public hospitals. And they will have an immediate, positive and long lasting impact on the health of the community.

All this is foreshadowed in the ALP policy. Obviously, changes of this kind need research and development, but there is nothing in what the Opposition proposes that runs counter to the thrust of health reform thinking in Australia. If criticism is justified, it should be leveled at the inadequate attention the policy has received and the wholly unjustified weight given to the Minister’s pathetic attack

Dearie me, the Labor party is at it again with borrow and spend. If Kevin Rudd is elected he will have to be very careful, particularly if he wants to bring our troops back from Iraq, that he doesn't go the way of David Longe. You will remember that Longe was elected in NZ in 1984, when NZ was up to its ears in debt, and decided to play silly buggers with the US over nuclear powered warships. After NZ was kicked out of ANZUS, Wall Street decided it would be a great time to call in the NZ foreign debt, and if my memory is correct housing interest rates there went up to around 25%.

This would certainly mean that we could forget about Keating's 17%.

Anyone with any feeling for the world monetary situation would know that this is not the time to go further into debt, and every effort should be made to reduce our debt while we still have the time. Thank heavens the Howard government has paid off our federal debt, and we only have private debt (albeit around $550 billion) to worry about.

If Labor want to throw billions at hospitals, fair enough. But they should do so by raising extra tax money to pay for it. Strangely enough, we never hear about that bit.