I often visit a "good" high care nursing home to visit my cousin who has an Aquired Brain Injury(ABI) as a result of a car crash as a 21 year old 34 years ago and hasin recent years had a stroke removing her speech.
Because of the cost or the profit motive there are insufficient staff
Pity help you if you can't speak like my cousin
Most of the residents rarely talk to each other. Those who can find living with lack of meaningful conversation very distressing and this can lead to depression and withdrawl. Physically disabled people are forced to live with people with advanced dementia.

For someone with a PHD in history this is poor analysis.

Privatised health care has *failed* in the USA, and public health care has not in Europe and elsewhere it has been tried. Once again, the BBs want the rest of us to pay for their entitlements.

The Health system issues are caused by:
a) Demographics. The spike in population caused massive deficiencies that required unusually large government spending to accommodate.
b) Profit taking from pharma companies, insurance, consultants, etc.
c) Under investment, poor funding.
d) Poor management practice, common to most industries where the poor BBs have not kept up with the modern world. (ie. HR managers with no computer skills, nor cultural skills, (nor HR skills!))

Later generations have enjoyed the economic wasteland that the BBs have left:
-Free education based on merit: Gone. Replaced by more private education. Instead of a first car, we paid off HECS. As with the US, costs go up, quality goes down.
-First payrise: Gone. Taken by companies as superannuation and stolen in fees, charges and insurance. All my first 5 years of Super was stolen by management. The rules were changed after the industry had screwed thousands of new workers.
-First house un-affordable because easy credit and negative gearing. On a single income, buying a house or saving for deposit was hard. Bank fees increased by 200% or so then too.
-Most super is now so degraded by the stock market bubble bursting, so we would have been better off with is in a safe investment.
-the rich got much richer, the poor are now common. (Yay for economic "rationalism")

So Gen X and Y say that the BBs have screwed us for long enough, they deserve any mess they are now in. I cannot wait for this generation to start retiring and maybe, just maybe a new generation of management can have a go.
I realise this is massive generalisation. Pitfall of talking about large groups, but it is *generally* true.

In my view, the user-pay principle is not suitable for everthing - healthcare is one of them. The real cost of healthcare is enormous and I would hate to see a system like the US where health care has become a luxury and a privilege of the rich.

Our system is not perfect but at least healthcare is accessible regardless of income. In the US, health insurance companies make vast amounts of money out of a 'deny first' policy which has led to many premature deaths for those who may have survived diseases like cancer had treatment been made available.

Can you imagine if we extend this user-pays principle to all government services. If we call the police or fire service should we pay the 'real' cost of the call out?

The idea of taxpayers funding these sorts of services is to spread the cost and the risk. It is a form of public insurance.

Chances are most of us won't need intensive hospital care in our lifetime but some of us will. I would rather a public funded safety net than be at the mercy of corporations whose only motivation is profit not care. The US is the best example of where the market does not self-regulate in regard to healthcare and the insurance industry.

Education has become a commodity too. Quality sacrificed to the corporatisation of getting a degree. A relative who lectures at one Australian university is thinking of giving it up as she is so sick of being pressured to pass students who bring money into the university but who cannot write a legible sentence to save themselves.

The private sector to control the health and ageing sector? A No vote from me.

Bleak indeed, Jeremy. I encourage anyone thinking about "longevity at all costs" to visit a few nursing homes and aged care hostels and see what the future has in store for them if they grow old and ill.

Not my idea of a future I'm afraid.

Perhaps we need to start developing strategies to get people to honestly assess whether being 90 and bed-ridden is much of a life goal.

In a post from Dec last year I set out some thoughts on the alternative (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8308).

Not an easy topic to deal with in the absence of emotive arguments (pro and con) but nonetheless, a topic worth discussing in light of the likelihood of an explosion in high care placement needs in the coming decades.

Yes bitey. Logically speaking, you might think that as we get older, we have less to lose, so that is the age when we should be taking up sky-diving, free-form rock-climbing and such like.

Health care is not privatised in the USA. It is heavily regulated at every level: funding, occupational licensing, drug adminstration, you name it.

The only reason we have socialised health care is because people hope to be able to force someone else to pay for their medical costs. Whether they can or not, what is certain is that we can't make the costs disappear. The idea of economising by getting large government bureaucracies to provide the services is laughably ignorant.

When are these rampantly anti-Whitlamite think tanks like the CIS going to finally get their maths correct?

The supposedly 'welfare-loving' Baby Boomer generation they so despise was actually born between 1945 and 1963 - which makes them a tad young to have been at the forefront of 1970s politics.

The people who drove the 1970s social-welfare reforms were born in the 1920s and 1930s. They were the Depression-era generation - which explains their preoccupation with social safety nets.