published letters

Published in The Age on Monday, August 13, 2007

Paul McMurrick is looking for a solution to the issue of the underfunding of the public health system and the taxpayer funding of the “private” taxpayer-supported system (Letters 10/8).

It’s so simple. Remove taxpayer support for the private system, starting off with removing it from the private health insurance rebate. Spend the savings in the public system. That way, the public system could gradually take most of the “good” things Cabrini Medical Centre and other publicly funded private hospitals have started to do, and which the public system used to do before. That way the credit card would not determine access to care.

Dr Tim Woodruff
President Doctors Reform Society