THE UNHEALTHY TRUTH
 
Everybody knows our health system is sick. Everybody. Especially patients. Especially people who are rushed to hospital in an ambulance and then wait hours to be admitted. Or be sent home. Especially older people who wait and wait and wait for what they jokingly call ‘elective surgery’. As if you ‘elect’ to have a worn out knee or hip replaced.

Especially over-worked doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers and paramedics playing bagatelle around the city as they try to beat the hospital bypass system.
 
Everybody knows. But does anybody really know how to fix it?
 
We’ve had promise after promise from Governments, both state and federal, around election time for about thirty years.
 
Before the last Federal election then Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd talked tough and said the health buck stops with me. If the states don’t fix things up
Quick smart I’ll take over the whole system in 2009. Well, like most of the other Rudd  threats and promises it didn’t happen.
 
And maybe that was just as well when you see how tragically Rudd and Garrett handled the giant insulation scheme.  If they couldn’t do insulations safely how could you trust them with inoculations?
 
The latest big brave Rudd scheme seems to be that the Federal Government will take over the purse strings for hospitals but get locals to run them.
 
Who will those people be?
 
Former Treasurer, and would be Prime Minister Peter Costello was right when he writes in The Age today that they would be the people now running the health system for state governments who would in future report to Canberra.
 
He makes a strong case: ‘Do you think this will make the hospitals run better?  Do you think the federal minister will take responsibility for any failures in the health system?  About as much responsibility as Garrett takes for insulation.
 
I’m not sure the Opposition would be any better.  Shadow Health Minister Peter Dutton was blathering on TV today about how New South Wales and Queensland needed special treatment at the expense of other states.  What sort of a national scheme would that be.
 
To me, both prescriptions are faulty. The patients will still suffer.
 
Wednesday, March 3, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010