Can't access premium content.

You're talking ancient history Froggie. We might as well talk about the Dismissal again.

The point now is that anyone with half a brain knows Medicare is not sustainable as is.
So what do we do, bearing in mind there are very few if any ideological opponents anymore?

-Outsource the processing to reduce costs, because we all know the public sector is bloody inefficient and overpriced
-Look at co-payments
-Raise the medicare levy substantially. . .TICK
-Squeeze the practitioners . .dead end solution

What's your solution?

I asked you what your solution was? Is there a pot of money you can find somewhere?
The doctors, nurses, pathologists, radiologists etc all have to be paid.
Where the fck is the money to come from?

bogarde73 wrote on Jul 13^th, 2016 at 3:50pm:


I would say the best thing one could do would be to conduct an independent cost/benefit analysis.  It must be independent to avoid protecting the "sweetheart" deals pharmaco's have negotiated.  If there are drugs with dubious benefits, can them.  If there are better alternatives, replace them.

Also, no matter how much we try to put it off, we can't forever avoid facing the issue of when prolonging life at all costs becomes so wasteful that we all suffer.

bogarde73 wrote on Jul 13^th, 2016 at 3:58pm:



yes ... get rid of all the wealth fare and there is plenty of money to pay for it

Mr Hammer wrote on Jul 13^th, 2016 at 3:42pm:


Here you go, in it's entirety




The Coalition and their backers are adamant. Despite decades of evil schemes cooked up by the dastardly unions the so-called ‘‘Medi-scare’’ campaign was the most sinister of all time.

Malcolm Turnbull’s election night speech was actually dedicated to how voters were duped by the sophisticated manipulation of union volunteers talking about Medicare.

Well, it’s nice to have your work acknowledged, I guess.

NSW was a stand-out state for Labor, with just about every marginal electorate falling the ALP’s way.

And unions did campaign hard on Medicare here.

Unions NSW coordinated countless protests in front of MP offices, calling on them to sign pledges saving Medicare.

Union volunteers, including thousands of nurses and other health sector workers, knocked on doors, supervised street stalls and made calls.

Medicare wasn’t the only issue on which unions campaigned. For months leading into the election, unions were busy talking to voters about workplace relations, education funding, jobs, the ­exploitation of overseas workers and much else.

But there’s no doubt Medicare was a key issue of focus — and it worked.

Now when something goes well, I think it’s natural to try to talk up how difficult it was.

    “Now when something goes well, I think it’s natural to try to talk up how difficult it was.”

Yet much as I enjoy the casting of unions as powerful agents of mind control, I have to be honest: most of the people we talked to were already scared about what the Liberals would do to Medicare.

And that’s the thing about so-called scare campaigns.

For people to be per-suaded that a party doesn’t represent their views on an issue, they have to pretty much believe it already.

Contrary to Mr Turnbull’s views, people aren’t easily manipulated chumps just waiting to be told what to fear.

There was a lot of talk about unions ringing seniors, for example. And it’s true, when calling voters we didn’t screen on the basis of age.

But the seniors union volunteers spoke to were not the silly old dears the Liberals imagine them to be.

Most had watched politics for a long time. They remembered that at every point since Gough Whitlam proposed universal healthcare in the 1970s, the Liberals have fought against it.

They remembered Malcolm Fraser scrapping Medibank. They remembered John Howard vowing to ­destroy Hawke’s Medicare. And they weren’t surprised by Mr Turnbull inviting the big banks to tender to run Medicare’s payment system.

They also remembered how Medicare was created in the first place, through ­unions agreeing to forgo wage rises in order to fund it through the 1980s Accord.

Russell Matheson, who was replaced by Labor’s Dr Mike Freelander in the Western Sydney seat of Macarthur, now complains he saw Medicare “biting at the booths,” but his party did nothing about it.

That’s nonsense. The Liberals spent whole weeks ­insisting they would never hurt Medicare.

But the problem with countering a scare campaign based on your track record is you can’t just say “trust us”. You have to work really hard to convince people you’ve changed.

You have demonstrate to people in detail that you understand why Medicare is important and why you’d never sell it.

Do you remember Turnbull, Scott Morrison, or anyone else doing this?

It’s only a scare campaign if it doesn’t ring true.

Mark Morey is secretary of Unions NSW