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July 22, 2009
By all accounts the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, which has been Commission to deliver the 'biggest health shake-up in decades', has avoided recommending a federal takeover of public hospital funding in spite of Rudd Government previous threat to take over public hospital funding if the states failed to sign on to hospital improvements.
Instead the Commission recommends a shift to better --more effective---primary care to ease the strain on emergency departments of public hospitals. This is more a systematic reform rather than a bandaid:
It would seem that what has been recommended by the Commission is that outpatient services and community health centres now run by states would transfer to federal funding. This would aim to ensure a better coordination of services for patients between federally-funded general practitioners, the state-financed community centres and hospital out-patient services and the GP super clinics.
Better community services ( primary care) would reduce demands on the over-stretched hospital emergency departments. So keeping people out of hospital by preventing disease, improving access to GPs, and overhauling the aged care sector is at the heart of reforms.
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For those interested in seeing a comprehensive side-by-side analysis of the Health Care Reform Proposals that have been put forth by Congress go to: http://www.gwumc.edu/sphhs/departments/healthpolicy/healthReform/Tables.cfm
This information was just released and offers a unique glimpse at how different provisions in each of the proposals could effect Health Care in America