A SICK JOKE
 
Our health system is sick. Don’t have to tell you that. The Herald Sun lists more hospital horror stories today with emergency wards in such crisis that some patients wait three hours to be admitted after being rushed there in an ambulance. Most wait more than an hour although the bench mark is meant to be 15 minutes bench.

At the same time the Treasurer Wayne Swan is pushing for an end to the 30% rebate on private medical insurance. Even though successive governments pushed and pushed you in expensive TV campaigns to sign up or be damned.
 
He says it will save billions of dollars over the next ten years. Maybe he should look for savings closer to home. At his own Health Department in Canberra.  He could start by reading a devastating article in yesterday’s Sunday Age. It reads like something out of Yes, Minister. But it’s not funny because it’s our money.
 
Myles Peterson got a job as a speechwriter for Health Minister Nicola Roxon. His main journalistic claim to fame was reviewing video games for the Canberra Times. No probs.
 
How much will you pay me? ‘$80,000 a year. Is that enough?’
 
Mr. Swan should pay close attention to the part of the story where the department head announced they were under budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
 
Cause for celebration?  Cause for panic, more like it. They all then went off on four-day junkets and cosy conferences to spend it all so that they wouldn’t get cuts in next year’s budget.
 
 Peterson recalls: ‘I later found myself in a plush Sydney harbourside hotel with hundreds of dollars of unnecessary travel allowance – everything  including meals, flights,  and accommodation was covered by the department.  
 
As The Age says: ‘Imagine Yes Minister meets Alice in Wonderland, a fantastical world peopled by wasteful bureaucrats and marred by bungles and duplications’.
 
Peterson was also surprised by the boffins behind the expensive public health campaigns. None were health professionals. They were all experts in marketing not medicine. And the Rudd government became the number one spender in the country on free-to-air television.
 
Yes Minister? No, Minister!
 
Monday, February 22, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010