>Mike Ballard suggests:
>>But if you're over 45 (the skills needed qualification cuts off at that
>>age) and not rich, best to get married. There are a lot of lovable Aussies.
>>Get on a plane.
>Yes, well, women are faced with having to get married to get health insurance
>here, too. It's a time-honored method for keeping females in line.
Keep in mind that divorce is easy in Australia, no need to *stay* married once you have your citizenship. So it won't work to *keep* anyone in line for long.
>
>Bill Bartlett:
>>That said however, the standard of universal health care has been
>>undermined a bit by 11 years under a Howard Liberal government.
>
>In the interests of self-preservation, you Aussies should be encouraging our
>fight to eliminate private health insurance companies here in the U.S.
>because, fattened on our blood, they're coming for your system next
>all armed with
>stories of terrible waits and how the public system spends too much
>tax money on
>the undeserving sick.
Precisely the Howard government's intention. They first had to undermine the public health system, because those stories wouldn't be taken seriously in a place that already had a decent public health system. As well as starving the public hospitals of funds, they have allowed the country to become utterly dependent on overseas-trained doctors. Because nowhere near enough have been trained here for many years. Even the doctor's union, the AMA, is complaining about this. I saw a headline in the Murdoch media yesterday where the AMA was screaming that Australia should be paying compensation for "stealing" doctors from poor countries. Which is very true.
The Howard government has systematically set about undermining the public health care system. It also established a massive public subsidy of the private health insurance industry. All private insurance is eligible for a direct 30% government subsidy, uncapped, completely open ended. It costs billions these days. The result is that Australia already has a two-tier system of publicly funded health care, the "public" system, with long waiting lists in public hospitals, and the "private" system (publicly subsidised) for those with private insurance.
My 79 year-old mother is one of the lucky ones, she gets a war-widow's pension and as such is entitled to a "Gold Card", through which the government pays the full cost of all medical expenses. So when she needed a hip replacement operation, she was able to get it done immediately in a private hospital all expenses paid. Otherwise she would have had to spend months on a public hospital waiting list, in constant pain and unable to move about. Thousands of people have suffered like that in John Howard's Australia.
All to prop up what was a dying private health insurance industry when the Liberals came to power. The deficiencies in the public system and consequent misery had to be manufactured, so as to create a demand for private health insurance. Scare stories wouldn't work without some reality to back them up.
But don't think this was all done by the Howard government merely for ideological reasons, as the social democrats would have you believe.
From the point of view of defending the capitalist system it was all quite necessary. Capitalism depends on scarcity and if scarcity has to be manufactured, then that is what has to happen. Even if it is scarcity of something as important as basic medical services, capitalism simply cannot function without scarcity and will have to manufacture it, should necessity arise.
So all you people talking as if a good public health system that provided for everyone was feasible within a capitalist system need to wise up.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas