THIS IS SICK!

I have been conned. And so have most of you. In a few days of big news stories and competing headlines it almost slipped past me.

It concerns the Howard Government’s cunning and calculated campaign to eviscerate Medicare. A snake oil move so smooth that Simon “ Dead Man Walking” Crean has hardly laid a glove on them.

And it all almost fooled me. To set the scene for my blinkered behaviour I have to flash back to a production meeting in my office after John Howard announced his magnanimous “ improvements’ to Medicare.

That was an instant before he jetted off to be dubbed a “man of steel” in Texas, to be engulfed in a standing ovation at Yankee Stadium in New York, and then his audience with the Queen and a matey chat with Tony Blair before doing a George Dubya with our troops in the Middle East.

That’s politically healthy. Who gives a tinker’s about the sick?

At my production meeting, preparing for my Drive programme, I was full of ideas about Iraq, and Texas, and the Hollingworth shortcomings. A producer hardly got a look in with a plea about the destruction of Medicare.

The Hinch reaction: What’s the big deal? I go to my doctor. He is a good doctor. He treats me well. I trust him. He bulk bills. I sign a piece of paper. Never get a bill. Big deal.

Medicare, the more sophisticated sibling of Medibank, is working. Compared to some other places I have lived this is Health Heaven.

And anyway John (Mother Theresa) Howard is going to spend millions of dollars to lure doctors to the Outback to help our country cousins.

No big deal. Right? Wrong!

A 25-year-old producer told me what she has to pay her GP every time she sees him. Then a university student e-mailed me and told me how she could no longer afford to go to her GP because he no longer bulk-billed.

Suddenly, it is a case of what the market will bear. Suddenly, this could be the GPs Teddy Bears’ picnic.

I am not a knee-jerk knocker of medicos. I accept that not every doctor rides around in a Merc and spends umpteen weeks a year at Drug Company funded “ conferences” at Monaco.

But the warning bells I have received since the much-vaunted Howard revamp of Medicare have prompted me to go back to some of the things John Winston has said about Medicare over the years.

It is not a pretty picture. You are entitled to think that there has long been a Howard agenda to torch Medicare as deliberately as a country arsonist in March.

What angers me now is that is has all been dressed up as such a dose of good medicine.

Twenty years ago John Howard took aim at Medicare. He vowed he would “ pull Medicare apart”.

He called the bulk-billing system “ an absolute rort” and, in fairness, I have to concede that there must have been bulk-billing doctors who cooked the books and serviced phantom patients.

For years, to be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly what “ bulk-billing” meant – or how much of my bulk was actually being billed.

It is worth going back a couple of decades and trawling through the quotes from when the “man of steel was “ little Johnnie Howard”.

He has obviously had Medicare in his sights for yonks. And his sincere and earnest quotes in an election campaign in 1995 are mocked by earlier quotes.

In 1995, the soon to be PM John Howard, pledged that “ we are going to keep Medicare, lock, stock and barrel”. He pledged that he would retain bulk-billing “ unequivocally”. Must have been a “ non-core” promise.

Try to make that gel with the pit bull terrier a few years before who called Medicare “ a miserable cruel fraud”.

The same man who said bulk-billing was “ an absolute rort” and called Medicare “a total and absolute failure”.

Hinch’s Hunch is that your costs for your local GP are about to go through the roof. Families with two or three little kids will find themselves paying hundreds of dollars more a year for basic services from their GPs.

What should anger you most is that we are all still paying a 1.5% Medicare levy on our income tax returns while the Federal Government has been playing multi-billion-dollar kissyfoot with the private health funds.

For the past few years they have been blackmailing you into joining private funds of which I am a paid-up member. They have taken your 1.5% tax levy and now they are trying to open the gates to let your GP charge you whatever he or she thinks for a visit.

Methinks it is possibly an incurable illness.

Michael Costello, former chief-of-staff for Kim Beazley, put it well this week when he wrote about Howard:

“He is destroying Medicare, but in a politically cautious and pragmatic way, denying with all the wonderful sincerity of which he is capable that he is doing any such thing”.

Costello is right. John Howard you almost conned me.

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©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002