....and then there's the US system.

Ours might not be perfect, but compared to the debacle in America where it's not uncommon for people to be bankrupted by major illness or injury. I think we should acknowledge that at least our communities are well protected.

Exactly correct P. Sometimes more often than not, the US style is far to free. Obama wants a form of medicare, and it's seen as a form of communism.
Their system is sink or swim, and mostly drown. Our system goes a long way for providing medical assistance for everybody.

The elephant in the room is the extreme cost of many recently developed treatments. Many of these treatments are just too expensive to be a productive exercise.

Sooner or later we are going to have no choice but to restrict free medicine to basic medicine, & the really high tech high priced stuff to those who can pay, or have paid with insurance contributions.

On TV medical shows, I see extremely expensive transplant operations being done on elderly folk, who to the community are merely a waste of space. Meanwhile there are middle aged productive folk, unable to work because they are waiting for a gall stone operation, or some similar much lower effort & cost operation.

The time comes when we must ask should we do these high tech operations, on elderly patients, just because we can, or should the effort be spread more productively on a greater number of people.

At over 70, & after 3 heart attacks, I will need a heart transplant if I have another. I can not see how I could expect the community to spend a couple of million to give me a couple of years, when there are thousands waiting for relative minor surgery, to enable them to return to a productive life.

Why should my neighbours, struggling to pay their mortgage have to fund the expensive reconstruction of the leg another neighbour shattered, illegally hooning around the pine plantation on his trail bike?

Some say we should not waste treatment on smokers, but see nothing wrong on treating illegal drug users. We have some strange moral responses in some areas.

Universal health care is not only unfair, but to me actually immoral.

Hasbeen,

People with means have always been able to afford better healthcare. Elderly people with means will take advantage of the healthcare available.

Where do we draw the line as far as universal healthcare is concerned?

The middle-class in the US are the hardest hit - especially the lower middles. They are the ones who lose their house if they happen to fall upon an interval of hard times, lose their job or some such debacle.

If you lose your job in Aus, and simultaneously suffer a health emergency that requires extensive medical treatment, you get to retain your house.

Remember, universal mans just that...when we start picking and choosing who is more deserving, we're in trouble.

Poirot I am in full agreement with all basic health care being provided, although I do believe it should not cost any one more than any one else. I only want to limit the vastly expensive treatments, for those who will get the least from them

I also don't want to pick the more deserving, just avoid the most wasteful.

If we are going to have full equity, we have to divert about half the funds currently lavished on breast cancer to prostate cancer, but no one is calling for that.

My neighbor with the gallstone problem was saying the other day, he wished he had a cardiac problem. He has watched me get the best & most rapid care with my heart attacks, while waiting for some years to get treatment.

Although it now prevents him being employed, he is told he is not sick enough to get priority treatment. No priority really means no treatment, except a trip to emergency with each attack.

We should not be spending hundreds of thousands on selected patients. We should be spending a few thousands on hundreds of patients, who can be returned to productive life.

“Medicare is but one more example of relying on government to be responsible for our welfare.”

Isn’t government the collective “us”?

There are some things that I believe we as a society should hold sacred and attempt to achieve before getting involved in other stuff. Government (the collective us) should ensure that everyone has access to food, shelter, education, healthcare and security. On the other side of the equation every individual has a social contract to contribute by their actions (financial & physical) in line with that individuals ability to achieve these aims and not to increase the cost to government (the collective us).

There are a lot of self-serving over rewarded snouts in both Medicare and private health cover trough. Very few of them contribute to a better or more cost effective health system. All of them contribute to increase in cost to Government (the collective us).

Might I suggest we convert all individuals (non-productive parasites) currently working for Medicare and the private health industry to (productive ) Doctors, Nurses, cleaners and other professionals that do contribute to real health outcomes? In addition to this all the cash that gets syphoned off to dividends, advertising, competitions, printing to mention some, would give a massive boost to the health system revenue. Then there are all the shop fronts, associated rent, vehicles and utility expenses that could contribute to additional physical health facilities.

The nice thing is that this will not cost us one cent more than what we pay now!

In my opinion Medicare and private health cover are both incubators for parasites and both contribute to the escalating cost of health.

I believe that Python gets it right again
Monty Python - Hospital Sketch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCITMfxvEc