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March 31, 2006
I've just returned to Adelaide after spending the day walking the federal Parliament in Canberra talking about the direction of health care reform and the problems caused by an expensive user-pays health system:
Leahy
Then on the shuttle flight home I read that the solution to the health care crisis by Queensland Health is privatisation---aah you can smell the hand of Treasury, can't you. David Gilchrist, writing in the Courier Mail quotes State Opposition health spokesman Dr Bruce Flegg, to the effect that:
it is likely that Queensland Health will increasingly provide health infrastructure while private contractors provide health care, training and research services....the result has been higher healthcare costs and, in some cases, the removal of services from public access....The Government has got itself out of a political fix by throwing some money at health and getting somebody in the private sector to bail them out.
So the Beattie government is creating a private system at the expense of expanding the capacity of the public sector and so deliberately choosing to go to a system that is more expensive to administer.
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Beattie may want to ask Rann why privatising health is a bad idea. Unprivatising the Modbury hospital was a key Labor election promise in the recent SA election.
Despite renegotiating the contract several times, the operator Healthscope was never able to turn a profit even though I understand the cost per patient is considerably higher than other SA hospitals.