PUBLIC MEDICINE MAYHEM

Three current articles below

Labor government to expand inferior healthcare

Sound crazy? It is. But that's the sort of destructiveness you regularly get when Leftist ideology takes charge. The Feds are going to spend more money on Australia's chaotic public hospitals in a bid to provide more staff per patient and cut waiting lists. Great! But they are ALSO attacking private health insurance -- thus sending more people into the public system and negating the effect of the extra funding for that system. You have to be a Leftist to be that moronic.

LABOR will shower public hospitals with cash in today's budget, adding to a $1billion boost it gave state governments in March, while facing allegations it is pursuing an ideologically driven vendetta against the private health sector. The Government yesterday accused the Howard government of neglecting public hospitals and promised that today's budget, the first Labor economic blueprint in 13 years, would restore the balance in health funding. But it also conceded one of its budget measures would trigger a reduction in the number of people with private health insurance, thereby placing more pressure on the public system.

The developments came as Kevin Rudd told a meeting of Labor MPs to expect "a good Labor budget", while Wayne Swan renewed his warnings that "tough decisions" could upset some citizens in a budget widely tipped to attack high-income earners.

As MPs began returning to Canberra for today's resumption of parliament, much of the political debate centred on Labor's plan to lift the threshold at which people face an extra surcharge for not having private health insurance, raising it from $50,000 to $100,000 for singles and from $100,000 to $150,000 for families. The Australian Health Insurance Association warned the move could prompt up to 400,000 people to dump their insurance and take their health needs to the public sector, already burdened by long waiting lists and inadequate resources.

Despite warnings this would put more pressure on public hospitals, Ms Roxon brushed aside the concerns. She advised health funds to make their products more attractive to consumers and said she would make no apologies for directing more resources into the public sector. Ms Roxon said the surcharge, introduced a decade ago to force higher-income earners to take out insurance, had become a "cruel hoax" on battlers because it had not been indexed. An income of $51,000 a year was no longer a high income, she said, and battlers were being unfairly exposed. "It's gradually hurt more and more people. We don't think that's fair and we're correcting that," Ms Roxon told Sydney radio station 2UE. "We're not going to keep working families under pressure where they get stuck either with the tax or taking out private health insurance when we know that the increasingly tight family budget just makes that a hopeless choice for many, many families."

Ms Roxon would not reveal government forecasts of how many people would dump their insurance and stressed the Government would continue to pay people with private health insurance a 30 per cent rebate, while vowing extra Labor funding for the public sector would enable it to meet increasing needs. "Unfortunately, the previous government neglected the public sector," she said. "I am very confident that the Rudd Labor Government, by investing more in the public hospital system and continuing to strongly support the private health sector, will get the balance right without putting unnecessary pressure on working families."

The weekend announcement of the change sent the shares of Australia's only listed private health insurer, NIB Holdings, plummeting. They finished down 16.11 per cent at 75.5c. If the same fall were applied to Australia's largest health insurer, the publicly owned Medibank Private, the Government would have stripped more than $300million in a single day off the value of its $2billion asset.

While the minister said yesterday that private health funds should have expected the surcharge would over time be indexed, Opposition health spokesman Joe Hockey said the move would hammer the private sector and lead to higher insurance premiums. "Either it's incompetence or it's ideological, and it seems to be ideological because it's very targeted," Mr Hockey told The Australian last night. "It seems to be targeted at private health providers. The impact on private health providers will be dramatic."

Earlier, Australian Private Health Insurance Association chief executive Michael Armitage said the change was being made for "socialist government philosophical reasons".

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From Medicare to mediocre

By Tony Abbott, Opposition spokesman

The Rudd Government is trumpeting that it has saved 2.4 million people from paying a Medicare surcharge. In fact, only 465,000 people paid the surcharge and each one of them could have avoided it by taking out private health insurance. If up to one million people now give up their private cover, as experts predict they will, Kevin Rudd will be directly responsible for a massive blow-out in public hospital waiting lists.

Sick people already wait for hours in public hospital emergency departments, despite the big increase in bulk-billing since 2003. Older people still wait months for elective surgery, despite a 16 per cent real increase in federal funding for state-run public hospitals under the present healthcare agreements. People tempted to thank Rudd for a tax cut won't be so grateful when they wait even longer for a hospital bed.

The Medicare surcharge is designed to ensure that people with higher incomes make a greater contribution to health costs. Fewer people covered by the surcharge means less money invested in the health system. At present, a family on $100,000 a year takes out private health insurance or pays an extra $1000 to Medicare. Most families in this situation have private insurance, which means that they don't compete with poorer people for elective surgery in public hospitals or can contribute to public hospital revenue by electing to be treated as private patients. Under the Rudd Government's announced changes, these families will have much less incentive to be privately insured. Many will drop out, especially because they also face higher grocery and petrol prices and higher interest rates since the Government's election.

Health analyst Andrew Goodsall says the initial effect of the Government's changes could be that 400,000 people drop out of private health insurance. Because the dropouts will mostly be younger and less costly to treat, Goodsall expects a disproportionate drop in profitability, perhaps a 10 per cent hike in premiums, and one million people ultimately losing private health cover. As a result, not only will more people be totally reliant on overstretched public hospitals but there could be a cascading effect on the viability of the private health system, which has been painstakingly restored since 1996.

After reaching nearly 70 per cent in the early 1980s, due to Hawke government policy changes, private health cover had dropped to just 30 per cent of the population by the mid-'90s. Then the Howard government introduced the Medicare surcharge for higher income earners without insurance, lifetime health cover to encourage younger people to join health funds, and the Medicare rebate to make health insurance premiums 30 per cent cheaper. Together, these policies increased private health coverage from six million to more than nine million people (including one million people earning less than $20,000 a year). Partly as a result, nearly 60 per cent of all surgery is now performed in private hospitals.

If even a small proportion of the 2.9 million episodes of private hospital treatment every year went public, there would be a substantial strain on public hospitals already struggling to cope.

In "economic conservative" mode before the election, Kevin Rudd and Health Minister Nicola Roxon were at pains to promise their full support for the private health sector. On November 20 last year, to "allay concerns" about Labor's historical bias against private health insurance, Rudd wrote to the Australian Health Insurance Association pledging that "Labor will maintain the Medicare levy surcharge".

Typically, Rudd has deliberately created a false impression without technically telling a lie. The surcharge has been maintained, but it has been altered in ways that fundamentally change its impact. Plainly, Rudd intends to rely on word games to justify junking other seemingly rock-solid commitments such as not means-testing the baby bonus. This is likely to turn out to be the 2008 version of core and non-core promises (only without the justification of an unexpected budget black hole) and to have an equal effect on the Government's standing.

Despite the Prime Minister's pose as "beyond Left and Right", there's already an old-fashioned feel to this budget. There's been much ado about minor changes that will "hit the rich" even though, in the case of the extra luxury car tax, they're likely to drive up prices for everyone. After the strain of having to appear economically responsible, ministers are enjoying playing Robin Hood but haven't yet realised that it's hard to hit the rich without hitting the poor.

Still, like the Labor premiers, Rudd has certainly learned the value of news management. Labor's spin about Medicare savings was front page news in at least four metropolitan newspapers while the reality that money was being taken out of the health system is now "old news", relegated to the back of the book.

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State minister accused of waiting list blowout

Below is the silly little airhead responsible for the healthcare of most people in NSW



The number of patients waiting for surgery at NSW hospitals has climbed to nearly 59,000, or about 55 extra people each week since Reba Meagher became Health Minister just over a year ago, the Opposition says. "Under Reba Meagher's watch, there are now more people waiting for surgery in NSW than at any other time during the last three years," the Opposition health spokeswoman, Jillian Skinner, said yesterday. The waiting list would increase further if the Federal Government doubled the Medicare levy surcharge threshold, which applied to taxpayers who did not have private health insurance, because at least 140,000 patients would flood the NSW public system, she said.

Ms Skinner called on the State Government to ensure NSW received more funding for its hospitals to cope with the expected rise in demand. Already overstretched doctors and nurses would come under more pressure from 140,000 extra patients.

Ms Meagher said the numbers waiting for surgery would "naturally rise as the population grows and ages, and the demand for medical services increases". The Opposition had "missed the point", she said, citing a drop in how long patients waited for surgery from an average of 3.6 months in June 2005 to 2.8 months in March this year.

She said the number of patients waiting more than a year for elective surgery had dropped from more than 10,000 to 255 in March and those waiting more than 30 days for urgent surgery had decreased from more than 5000 in 2005 to 102. "What matters is that people who need elective surgery have their procedure within the clinically recommended time frame, and that is what is happening," she said.

The Opposition says the hospital waiting list dropped from 58,461 in March 2006 to 51,779 in December 2006, the last reported figures before the state election. The figure then jumped to 55,972 in March last year, and was 58,839 a year later, it says. The Federal Government announced in January it would spend $150 million on cutting elective surgery waiting lists, of which NSW would receive $43.3 million.

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Backdown on school 'league tables'

School secrecy prevails. Parents must not be told how bad a government school is

National literacy and numeracy testing of Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 school students begins for the first time today but frustration looms for parents who want to use the test results to compare individual school performance. Despite the Rudd Government declaring it was vital that Australians knew how well the education system was performing in providing literacy and numeracy skills, state education bureaucrats have vowed to stop the outcomes of the tests being released on a school-by-school basis. Individual schools will still have to report their results, but not until more than a year after the tests are taken.

The Queensland Studies Authority says it will keep secret results that would identify school performance on the tests. The authority also has reminded school principals that student assessment information it collects is exempted from release under Freedom of Information laws. It has warned schools that "access to these reports should be limited to those who have a legitimate reason to do so". Instead, the published data is likely to only compare the performance of the states as well as males and females and indigenous and non-indigenous students.

Parents will get reports on the performance of their child in the tests and schools will receive student, class and school reports. But, under current rules, parents wanting to know how their school fared in the tests this week may have to wait until June 30 next year to access the information.

The tests, hailed as the first truly national assessment of children's literacy and numeracy skills, will be spread over today, tomorrow and Thursday. It is the first time Year 9 students have sat national literacy and numeracy tests and also the first time all students will sit the single national test. Education authorities across the country decided on May dates for the testing because it was early enough in the year for the results to help diagnose learning problems or issues.

Parents will receive reports showing how their child has performed on a scale of achievement using bands, allowing the child's progress in numeracy and literacy to be tracked throughout their schooling. Education Minister Julia Gillard said parents would not just know how their child was performing against a national benchmark but whether he or she was in a low achievement band or a high achievement band. However, Ms Gillard yesterday ducked questions about how the performance of individual schools would be reported. "At this stage what parents are going to get is their own report card," she said in a radio interview. "We are talking to state and territory governments about the best use of this information. Obviously it can be used by government to work out who needs additional assistance."

State Education Minister Rod Welford said there would be little change from previous testing arrangements. He said parents should reassure their children that the tests include material that they would have covered in the classroom. "The real focus of the assessment program is to look at how students are performing and where they may need help so we can then look at our teaching and curriculum planning," he said.

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