Articles

Structural problems won’t be fixed by doubling rebates. Voluntary patient enrolment can improve access if funding varies with SES.

Our health services are struggling. For patients, even the wealthy, it can be difficult to access timely care. For all patients there is no ‘system’. They see a collection of poorly connected, differently funded services which they are expected to negotiate. Read more

Rorts and Revamping Medicare

This series of three articles looks at the above topic under the headings:

1. The Vision: Where could we be?
2. The Reality: Where are we now?
3. Implementation: How do we proceed with the needed changes?

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“The many problems in our society exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the response to it have been largely ignored by the Federal Government’s budget”, said Dr Tim Woodruff, President, Doctors Reform Society. “Residential Aged Care has been ignored. Aging in the home has been trickle fed. 1.6 million unemployed have been left in poverty on Job Seeker, waiting for the job creation which will be slow and painful. Poverty kills. And the middle aged unemployed have been left on the scrapheap, despite being much more likely to have dependant families, and sadly perhaps because women make up a much larger percentage of this group”. Read more

Covid-19 presents us with an opportunity. A more equal society, more resilient to the challenges ahead, or a society ruled by power imbalances, struggling to cope with both natural and man-made disasters. Read more

How do we keep our population healthy?  From a patient perspective we don’t have a health system. From a provider’s perspective we don’t have a health system.

The nightmare for patients consists of multiple poorly connected pieces: the public hospital system, the publicly subsidised private hospital system, the GP system, the publicly subsidised private specialist system, the community care system, the publicly funded private allied health system, the private mental health system, the public mental health system, the private dental system, the publicly funded private dental system, the public dental system, the Aged Care system, and a myriad of other pieces. Read more

Australia doesn’t have a health system. We have a maze of poorly connected health services which barely manage to work together to provide health care of extremely variable quality depending on many competing variables such as income, geography, ethnicity, culture, and type of illness. In addition, politicians generally do not link health outcomes to other crucial factors in our lives, the social determinants of health, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.  Read more

Much has been written about the problems of the Private Health Insurance (PHI) industry. Desperate attempts to make an inherently inefficient product less inefficient have been proposed. Such suggestions do nothing for the inherent unfairness of taxpayer subsidised PHI. But something needs to be done and it should address both the inefficiencies and the inequities. Read more

The recent election result was a major disappointment for those interested in improving the health of the nation. The re-election of the Coalition promises an ongoing increase in support for private health insurance as the Government continues its long-term agenda of two tiering the health system. Read more