While it wasn’t quite as prominent as WorkChoices and climate change, Kevin07 did make some fairly ambitious promises for the health care sector as well. As the Pandora archive reveals,
“Whenever there’s a problem, the question of adequacy of funding for hospitals, automatically there’s a ping-pong match which erupts between the federal and state health ministers,” says Labor Leader Kevin Rudd. “I am committed to ending the blame game.”
At the time, they released a discussion paper, which mentioned a number of models for reforming the way health care was funded. But, since the election, there doesn’t seem to have been much progress.
The government established the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission in February 2008. While the terms of reference were available, they haven’t yet got around to setting up their own website, let alone taking any submissions. Given their goal of a final report in June 2009, you’d have to wonder when they’re going to get their finger out. The contrast with the Garnaut Review is pretty stark…
But that’s not the only health-related thing going more slowly than anticipated. The review of the Medicare schedule, as promised here, is also proceeding rather slower than predicted. From what I’ve been told, this is at least partly because of disagreements between state and federal health bureaucrats.
Maybe the second half of this term of government is going to see health become a major reform focus, when the Commission finally delivers. But, at least from here, you’d also not be surprised if it got quietly tossed in the too hard basket.
Update: Courtesy of Bogong in comments, I was wrong. Here’s the website; submissions were advertised and closed on May 30th. I’ll do a followup when the submissions are published.
I was part of a submission sent away on 30 May 2008. So I don’t know about not taking submissions.
Part of the reason these things proceed slowly is that after the 20 second news grabs and simple rhetoric from politicians someone has to do the hard work and get down to finding out what is actually going on as opposed to what pollies in election mode allege is going on. More often than not there is a wide gap.
Despite the spin I can’t see the 31 new GP superclinics doing much more than poaching GPs from existing services.
Thanks for that FXH.
Do you know if they’ve formally asked for submissions anywhere?
I think “since the election, there doesn’t seem to have been much progress” should read “little progress seems to have been reported by state/ national media”.
Toowoomba Base Hospital reported its excellent (and widely lauded) progress in The Chronicle, but this certainly was not picked up by the state/ national press; although I’m sure that, had the report been negative not positive, it would have been all over The Courier Mail. Fine public hospitals are not what CM wants to acknowledge publicly!
Reading the report, I wondered how many other hospitals are also reporting excellent results which, at best, get no further than local papers.
DeeCee: when I said that there hadn’t been much progress, I was referring to progress on the plans to reform the way health care is funded, to “stop the blame game”, as it was put in the election campaign.
I’ve no doubt that individual hospitals are doing good things. Indeed, our life expectancy keeps going up, so the health system must be doing something right…
“Do you know if they’ve formally asked for submissions anywhere?’
I’m not sure - I could find out.
Most of these things will take almost any submission even if they haven’t called for it. If it isn’t clear what to do its a good idea to send a one or two page sheet with succinct points and give a contact address etc in case they find your particular submission so unique, brilliant and relevant they are amazed they have never heard the idea before and/or they are interested in detail on your (and others) general themes.
Even long tinfoil hat blog type rants often get acknowledged in the appendices [great for ego - “the orgon field magnetic effect as I noted in the Great Tea Trolley Disaster Inquiry of 2006 by Prime Minister and Cabinet”] but if you want to have any effect short is more likely to get read.
I must say that the absence of even a a basic public service template website is inexcusable. If I was advising them I wouldn’t suggest a comment thread tho.
I get the impression that Nicola Roxon doesn’t actually have many policies except to create lots of committees that will report back in 2009. She constantly talks about ‘reform’ but never explains exactly what she will reform and how. Does she mean she will reform the massive subsidies propping up the private health insurance industry?
The Commission has a web-site at http://www.nhhrc.org.au
Formal submission have closed but if you get something in quick (and concise) they may still look at it. They have also been out and about consulting with the community.
I am not connected to the Commission but they are an impressive group of people given a very wide scope.
The proof of the pudding will be in their final report due mid next year and more importantly what the Government does with it.
The Government is also reviewing primary care and mental health and has established reviews in this area. It is not a bad thing to do your homework before making substantive changes to a finely balanced (and struggling) system to make sure you “do no harm” and end up making things worse rather than better. As with the Reform Commission, the time for judgements will be when the homework is handed in.
Thanks, Bogong - that was a stuffup on my part. Sorry to the commissioners in the unlikely event they read this…
It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.