ImSpartacus2 wrote on May 26
th, 2015 at 11:28am:
How do you know all this aqua? Personal experience, a friend of a friend tell you or you just making up stories, AGAIN!!!! You might also note that Herb's story relates to the scamming he encountered in the private health system and his treatment in the public health system was light years ahead. But you know, you keep on with your mantra, black is white and white is black.
costs in running public hospitals are increasing at 11 % per annum.
medicare rebates have been frozen for private doctors for the last 2 years and will remain frozen until 2018.
yet all state governments continue to direct patients who have waited too long on waiting lists to the private system where the operations can be done more cheaply .
there is no doubt that public hospitals have higher nurse to patient ratios and that they have much higher unit costs for operations.
Public enterprise are the ones always pressuring govts to direct public patents their way because they want to get their snouts in the trough and at the same time they pressure govt to put less $$$$ into public health because they can't compete with the quality of care and the value. Its like Rupert murdoch wanting to destroy the ABC. Because he cant compete with it and people see the ABC as value for money compared to the shyte he pedels. And it doesn't surprise me that public hospitals have higher nurse to patient ratios because public hospitals are far less likely to compromise patient care for the sake of cost cutting. A majority of people would rather see more money spent on public health because most (like me) have had good experiences with public hospital care. Mine was a hernia operation and my brothers was a heart attack. My brother in law is an experienced doctor with his own practice and he has repeated to me often that private hospital care is nothing compared to public hospital care and my person experience has born that out every time.
The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB, Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, ECU, Flinders, Griffith, the Harry Perkins Institute, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, UQ, QUT, SAHMRI, Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA, UNSW, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.
Yes, yes all these figures and all these graphs from hired guns to talk up american style private enterprise in our hospital system. People recognise BS when they see it. I'm happy for studies like this when they are independent (not by right wing think tanks or governments who are just as eager to destroy public health) and compare apples with apples. When private enterprise does comparisons like this apart from fiddling the numbers they also rarely compare apples with apples, such as the comparative quality of the care you get and the externalities (in the form of hidden costs) that private enterprise pass on to you that they public system does not
The cost of operations varies from hospital to hospital but a higher price doesn’t equal better care. TheTun/Shutterstock
Public hospital spending has been the single fastest-growing area of government spending over the past decade. As governments, policymakers and economists put health spending under the microscope, it’s becoming increasingly clear that continuing the present trajectory is not an option.
Grattan Institute’s report Controlling costly care: a billion-dollar hospital opportunity, released today, shows that improving efficiency in Australian public hospitals could save taxpayers nearly A$1 billion a year.
Cost variation
Grattan’s study identifies significant variation in the costs of treating patients, after adjusting for their illnesses and other legitimate factors. The graph below illustrates how the cost of laparoscopic cholecystectomies – a type of gall bladder removal – differs depending on where it happens.
Grattan Institute analysis
Click to enlarge
Any type of procedure will be slightly different from case to case. But overall, the costs of laparoscopic gall bladder removal surgeries should be expected to be quite similar.
Despite this, costs vary dramatically. In Queensland, the median hospital removes gall bladders for around $6700, while in Victoria the median hospital does it for around $5000. Within NSW, the hospital with the highest cost is more than twice as expensive as the hospital with the lowest cost.
These differences don’t seem to be caused by how many of these procedures a hospital does. Among the five hospitals that do the most, median costs range from less than $4200 to almost $8000.
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