>I was recently diagnosed with bowel cancer. Fortunately, the stool test was
>free as was the colonoscopy, and eventual surgery. But it was a terrifying
>wait, after the "blood in the stool test" for for the colonoscopy because of
>the shortage of doctors in the public health sphere. The shortage of doctors
>has a lot to do with the politics of trying to undermine Medicare, from the
>lack of places in the university system to train new Aussie doctors (this is
>heavily influenced by the AMA) to the constant underfunding of Medicare
>payments to physicians (thank-you Tony Abbott, LP Minister of Health), which
>turns into an ever increasing "gap" which the patient must then fork out.
>However, the poorest people still *do* get the privilege of having their
>services "bulk billed" i.e. government paid. But, you gotta be real
>poor, like
>me, to get that treatment and then, of course, there are the waits caused by
>the aforementioned inadequate university places for doctors and the funding of
>services. Lots of healtcare people wander off to the private sector where they
>get paid more. The market system, indeed....I hate it with a passion.
>Fortunately, my cancer was taken out in time, stage one. As to the costs of
>all the tests, drugs, ct scans, surgery, colonoscopy, endoscopy, consultations
>and week long hospital stay....total out of pocket expenses=$200 AUD.
A friend of mine spent months waiting for an operation recently, leg artery had blocked or something. He could barely walk a few yards. Now he's waiting for another operation to do with some kind of arthritis in the shoulder. It will be months. The only consolation is that, as he is unfit for work he gets Pharmaceutical Allowance with his dole and a grudging respite from the work test.
The shortage of medical specialists in Tasmania is chronic. As you say, the AMA likes to restrict the supply of doctors as much as they can, to sustain the high fees. As any good union would do. But the state government which runs the public hospital system doesn't seem to grasp the fundamentals of market economics and tries to hire them on the cheap anyhow. So the public hospitals never have enough money to pay market price for doctors and nurses. Which means naturally that vacancies remain unfilled for moths at a time. I suspect this keeping vacancies unfilled is a deliberate strategy to reduce costs, though I have no personal experience with the system (not since I had my appendix removed when I was 20).
Oh well, shit happens. As our Federal Health Minister so wisely observed the other day.
>Of course, I'll be voting Labor and Green in the coming election and putting
>out as many of their leaflets to members of the community in which I live as I
>can, which isn't to say that I'll quit agitating for the abolition of outmoded
>wages system of mass subservience.
They letting you vote!? I didn't realise standards had slipped so much, where the hell is John Howards tough new citizenship test when you need it? ;-)
Make sure you filter your Labor vote through the the Greens of course, the Greens even have a good chance of winning a seat in the Senate in WA. One more tip - eschew the party vote, number all your own preferences manually. You can't trust any political party to decide how your preferences are allocated, that's how that numbskull Fielding got a seat in Victoria.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas