BigOl64 wrote on Feb 16
th, 2012 at 4:35pm:
Dirty Paki Khunt wrote on Feb 16
th, 2012 at 4:25pm:
So public hospitals are a form of charity?
Have you heard of the Medicare levy?
What the hell are you on about.
Haven't I spoken to you about deliberately 'misrepresenting' my posts, it doesn't become less annoying with repetition.
If I meant to say that public hospitals were a form of charity then that's is what i would have written.
Present your own argument instead of trying (poorly) to misrepresent that of others or I will start treating you like nails, greens, booby and corpulent whitey instead of an adult.
How would you like me to put it? If you pay the Medicare levy, you're as entitled to a public bed as anyone else.
Private hospitals are often not much more than sterilized hotels attached to public teaching hospitals. They usually use the same theatres, anaethetists and theatre nursing staff.
The private "system" is not a lot more than an add on to the public hospital system, and it was designed that way by people who saw a buck in it. The health lobbies are the biggest in the world, and political parties need their donations.
This is why we even have private health insurance following the creation of Medicare. The industry were worried the business model would collapse and furiously lobbied the government to offer rebates.
They called this "consumer choice."
They then marketed themselves with a few free acupuncture sessions thrown in as a bonus. They don't fully cover you unless you pay them more in premiums than what it would cost a healthy person to pay a doctor or dentist anyway, and if you aren't healthy, they don't give you full coverage either.
It's not an efficient form of public health, and it's not cheap. The profits go to shareholders rather than doctors and nurses. You can't syphon funds into non profit services like mental health. You end up with flashy patient rooms with plush carpet and nice pictures on the walls but effectively the same treatment as the public system.
It works in the US because they have an ailing public health system. There, there is no choice, and it's kept that way by healthy campaign donations.
In Australia, we have an entirely different model, and we should never cease to be grateful for it.