SM,

"If you had bothered to read any of the articles with respect to the co payment, you would realise that its prime function was to give people a price signal that medical visits had some value."

Okay....now could you explain to me how that dovetails with Abbott's most vociferous and clear-as-a-bell statements prior to election that "There will be no changes to health"?

You do make me laugh at impugning Gillard for "deceit".

We now have a situation where it's nearly impossible to locate a single area where the PM and his shonky govt haven't lied.

There are so many lies that we can hardly keep track of them.

Entertaining, to say the least.

poirot: There are so many lies that we can hardly keep track of them.
Entertaining, to say the least.

Insert, "from both all Political Parties," after, "lies,"

Sad, so sad.

Hiya Jayb,

Can you name me a govt who has begun its tenure by back-flipping on around 95% of its pre-election spiel?

At present, the only areas where Abbott appears to have kept his pre-election "promises" are his intentions to axe the carbon & mining taxes and install his PPL.

And that's beside all the "surprises" he's sprung on the electorate since lying his way into govt

"There will be no changes to health"?
Poirot,
You'll get to eat your own words when the health services start to improve because of this.
You really don't appear to see how much waste this will cut out do you ?
Go to your average public health facility & count how many are simply taking up valuable doctors' time by not staying home instead & do their own dressings.
25% are hypocondriacs who just want some attention because their own families don't give them the time of day & the other 25 % are lazeabouts with no interest in looking after themselve better & find it easier to be on drugs & then clogg up the health system.

poirot: Can you name me a govt. who has begun its tenure by back-flipping on around 95% of its pre-election spiel?

Yep. ALP, LNP, somewhere along their tenure.

Gee's that was easy. Sad, so sad.

We’ve had another week of the Coalition crawling through the mud of its budget sales job to a hostile electorate.
The government thought it was on to something with its argument that, of course, Labor had once advocated a medicare co-payment in 1991.
Strangely, it didn’t mention that at least Labor was proposing to exclude all federal health concession cardholders from the scheme, and boost the Medicare safety net.
But you wonder whether the Coalition would now be able to persuade that a co-payment, even on the Labor basis, was fair, or that anything in the budget is “fundamentally fair”.
What’s more, the more tyres that are being kicked on the budget car, the less persuaded people seem to be that it is in the national interest either.
That is, that the various “reforms” may produce a smarter, more productive country. You even have to wonder whether it can deliver the outcomes the government says it wants.
Here is just one example of how some unrelated policy shifts in the budget may interact with potentially disastrous implications for our health system.