Wealthy get faster access to surgery even in public hospitals

Rather surprising that rich people go to public hospitals at all. Over 40% of all Australians have private health insurance and Australian private hospitals are generally first-class. The rich go public mainly because they or their doctor "knows someone", I suspect. Bureaucracies are particularly susceptible to that. If you are "in favour" in a bureaucracy, they will throw the rule-book right out the window for you on occasions. I have seen some remarkable examples of that in my own circle

Rich people have the shortest waiting times for elective surgery while middle income earners wait the longest, a new report on public hospital waiting lists shows. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study shows middle income earners wait an average of 31 days for elective surgery while the rich wait just 24 days. The poorest Australians wait 30 days for surgery.

And living in a big city doesn't guarantee faster access to a public hospital operating table -- those living in inner regional areas get into hospital faster, waiting an average of only 27 days for surgery, while those in big cities wait 29 days.

Private health insurance membership has nothing to do with the rich getting faster access to hospital. AIHW spokeswoman Jenny Hargreaves says the waiting-time figures applied only to public hospitals and had no connection to a person's insurance status. And she could give no explanation for the finding that rich people had shorter waiting times than others.

The report shows private hospitals are now carrying out 61 per cent of the 1.6 million elective surgery procedures every year while public hospitals perform just 39 per cent. The rich were more likely to use private hospitals, with the report finding 261,358 of them went private for elective surgery. But over 73,000 wealthy people used a public hospital when they had elective surgery.

More middle income earners used private hospitals than public for elective surgery, with 127,596 going public and 184,617 going private. Only the poorest Australians relied more on public hospitals than private, but 149,571 still used the private system.

The report found the waiting times varied a great deal depending on the patients diagnosis, with cancer patients waiting on average 15 fewer days before surgery. The longest waiting times were for knee and hip replacements. Those with gonarthrosis of the knee had an average waiting time of 119 days, and one in five waited longer than a year for surgery. Patients with senile cataracts waited much longer for access to surgery than other cataract removal patients.

More than 87,910 patients had an adverse event connected with their elective surgery. Over 23,000 had complications with the hip and knee replacements or other implants inserted during surgery.

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Healthy living campaigns seen as 'patronising'

Why? Because they are. What people do with their own bodies is their business. They don't need fad-happy do-gooders lecturing them

A Queensland researcher says healthy living campaigns are not getting through to people from low socio-economic backgrounds. Julie-Anne Carroll from the Queensland University of Technology has conducted a study which found many felt "patronised and overwhelmed" by advertising urging them to exercise. It also found they were reluctant to exercise in public because of poor body image.

She says health professionals need to create more targeted campaigns. "There's a big socio-economic divide when it comes to people being overweight and under-active," she said. "Health professionals need to respond to this public health problem in a more targeted way by designing messages and interventions that resonate more effectively within poorer contexts."

Ms Carroll says exercise is a low priority for many people from disadvantaged backgrounds due to cost and accessibility. "People from poorer backgrounds don't relate and don't feel like these sorts of goals are feasible or achievable given the number of challenges, and these need to be taken into account when physical activity is being promoted," she said. "There need to be local resources for children and even adults and mothers can go to that don't cost anything."

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Rudd blows $70 million of taxpayers' money for nothing

Car giant Toyota had already decided to make a hybrid version of its Camry sedan in Australia and did not need the $70 million of taxpayer-funded subsidies promised by the federal and Victorian governments yesterday. Kevin Rudd, speaking at a meeting with Toyota executives at their Nagoya plant in Japan, yesterday pledged $35 million to the company from Labor's new Green Car Innovation Fund as an incentive to assemble the vehicles at the Altona facility in Victoria. Victorian Premier John Brumby matched the $35 million figure.

But the funding promise has been undermined by local Toyota chiefs, who told The Australian the decision to make petrol-electric hybrid Camrys in Australia had already been made and was due to be announced "within months". Toyota Australia spokesman Mike Breen said the subsidies meant the announcement was brought forward. It would have gone ahead without the $70 million cash injection, which was not critical to the proposal, he said. "It would have happened regardless and we wouldn't bring it to market unless we're going to make money," Mr Breen said. "It's always nice to have support but it comes back to a business decision."

Toyota has been explicit about its wish to produce a hybrid version of the Camry in Australia since the model went on sale in Japan two years ago. At yesterday's announcement, Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe refused to say if his company would have opted to build the hybrid in Melbourne without the taxpayer assistance, under which the Government will offer $1 for research and development for every $3 spent by the company. But Mr Watanabe confirmed Toyota "only recently" heard it would receive a $35 million subsidy from the Australian Government's $500 million green car fund "so we are not sure how we will use it".

The hybrid Camry will go down the same assembly line as the petrol version already built at Altona, with all the engine components imported complete from Japan ready to drop into the car.

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Greenie feelgood fades

Comment by Janet Albrechtson

Kevin, we need to talk. We need to talk about our future. Don’t get me wrong. The early days of carefree symbolism were fun.

Signing the Kyoto Protocol provided a nice, cost-free inner glow to our collective conscience about climate change. Turning off our lights for Earth Hour was a similarly low-cost bit of climate change fun, as we sat by the dreamy glow of candlelight. And who can forget going to the movies to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, shedding tears for humanity and those poor polar bears? Now that the gimmicks are over, we need to get serious about our relationship. Our relationship with climate change. We need to talk about cost. Yes, I know, money is such a gauche topic. But we need to talk about just how much confronting climate change is going to cost us. Kevin, isn’t it time to start telling us how it will affect petrol prices, the cost of our groceries and our electricity bills?

Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that Rudd’s climate change policies were a welter of half-truths and platitudes dipped in soaring rhetoric to make them saleable. But now that the glossy pre-election promises are being analysed, probed and costed, the Rudd Government’s carefully constructed appeal to environmental morality is unravelling.

We now know, for example, that the mandatory renewable energy target of 20 per cent of power generation is very likely to be an expensive waste of time and money. While the solar and wind industry enjoy being propped up by government, the Productivity Commission has pointed out that mandatory targets for renewables, operated in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme, will drive up energy prices while doing nothing to reduce emissions that the ETS can’t do on its own.

We also now know that the ETS is likely to make life very expensive for the Prime Minister’s beloved working families. Rudd told the National Climate Change Summit in March 2007 that “climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”. He made the issue a quasi-religious matter impervious to matters of mere money. Similarly, when he spoke to the Global Foundation a few weeks earlier, he committed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, cut greenhouse pollution by 60 per cent by 2050 and introduce a national emissions trading scheme because “our planet is calling us to action”. More morality. No mention of costs.

Rudd’s aim was to seduce, not spook, voters. Indeed, apart from Work Choices, Rudd’s critical election winning promises were that he would answer the moral call to environmental arms while simultaneously reducing the financial burden on working families. More than six months later, Labor is being slowly mugged by reality. Penny Wong belled the cat last week when she finally admitted that the ETS “would have an impact on different prices in the economy”.

It now turns out that even a “soft” start to the ETS where carbon is priced at $20 a tonne will see the average household pay $200 per year more in power costs and petrol would jump 5.6c a litre. At $45 a tonne, three out of the four brown coal power stations in Victoria and others in South Australia, NSW and Queensland would close. Household power bills would be up by 50 per cent.

Even more frightening is modelling by Deutsche Bank that suggests the carbon price should at present be $65 a tonne, rising to $105 by 2020. These sorts of estimates explain why one industry association head has speculated that electricity bills could double and petrol could increase by 17c a litre.

The Rudd Government has good reason to feel nervous. When asked recently whether they would support a small hike in the price of petrol if the extra money was used to tackle climate change, 63 per cent of survey respondents said no. When the Government started means testing the solar rebate, guess what happened? The solar panel business dropped off. Turns out that working families are not so keen on climate change mitigation when it hits their hip pocket.

Having sold an alluring dream last year, Rudd will now need to do some fancy footwork to maintain any semblance of public trust on the issue. And already the soft-shoe shuffle and the fudging have started. The Government’s climate change expert, Ross Garnaut, is foreshadowing a “soft” start to the ETS, with its full rigours being introduced only in 2013. Phew. That’s two elections away, Rudd must be thinking.

In truth, these might be sensible compromises. However, Australians might have appreciated this kind of candour when Labor was whispering sweet nothings in our ear last November. There are a few things the Rudd Government needs to do immediately to start rebuilding its fragile hold on our affection. First, it needs to scrap the promise to plough taxpayers’ money into funding a green car after the Productivity Commission has shown how much it will cost and how useless it will be. It will only end up confirming what we already know: governments are lousy at picking winners.

Critically, they could start telling the truth about carbon capture and storage: so-called “clean coal technology”. The sad truth is that while Martin Ferguson is right to point out how valuable such technology could be to a country long on coal, Labor needs to remind working families about the costs. Billions will be spent and power bills will be much higher. The collapse of the Rio Tinto/BP $2 billion plant in Western Australia and the US FutureGen project suggests that CCS will not be a short-term solution.

And given that storage of carbon waste attracts similar problems to storing nuclear waste, Labor’s confected outrage against nuclear power makes little sense and prevents a sensible debate of all the issues.

It may be that the real reason the Rudd Government refuses to come clean on climate change is that it would force it to think about the unthinkable. Come on, Kevin. Don’t be just another environmental playboy. The commitment-phobes in Labor won’t like it. But if we’re to have a future, there’s another thing we need to talk about. Nuclear. 

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