cthulhu wrote:Works great.
Compared to the US mess it is a damn miracle working system.
But in practice the good bits are the public system and collective public bargaining power for drug purchases. The private system is just free money for corporate shills at the expense of the public system.
Now I can find you a pile of reputable Australian sources if you like, but this obscure Canadian article actually brings it all together very nicely.
Verna Milligan wrote:It is encouraging to see that Senator Kirby warns that a private, parallel health care system “would be highly regrettable.” After all, whether it’s public or private health care, citizens end up footing the bill. Australian citizens have been supporting both their public system and a private, parallel system. But in the last year and a half there have been shock waves in their parallel system that are reverberating throughout the whole economy and, according to experts, creating a “national crisis” that will cause “massive collateral damage” to their public system.
Firmly believing that the private, parallel system would eventually relieve the pressure on the public system, their federal government has been subsidizing private insurance corporations by $2.5 billion per year during the past five years.
Australians who purchase private insurance receive 30 percent annual rebates on their income tax. Their Senate study, however, indicated that 3 to12 percent more health care could have been delivered if this money had gone into the public system. (Another Senate recommendation stated that privatization of public hospitals be abandoned until a thorough national investigation shows an “advantage for patients”.)
Yet, in spite of this windfall, Australia’s second largest private insurance company, HIH, became the biggest corporate collapse in the country’s history with a massive $5.3 billion bankruptcy in March, 2001.
There are victims galore, with billions of dollars of shareholder and creditor funds up in smoke, and victims of workers compensation and disability pensions.
A public outcry has resulted in an ongoing Royal Commission with disclosures revealing Enron-like corporate largesse and executive bonuses skyrocketing from $340,000 to $7.2 million in two years
“Not only the thousands of people staring at financial ruin”, states a Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) Columnist June 1st last year, “but the rest of us, the hapless taxpayers, are called on yet again to socialize the losses…”
A public outcry has resulted in an ongoing Royal Commission with disclosures revealing Enron-like corporate largesse and executive bonuses skyrocketing from $340,000 to $7.2 million in two years. Both corporate auditing, Andersen Accounting, and the government regulators have been found to lacking when it comes to protecting citizens.
While still reeling from the HIH taxpayers’ tab, Australians were shocked to learn that their country's main provider of malpractice insurance, United Medical Protection, collapsed this April, leaving sixty percent of Australia’s physicians without malpractice insurance.
The results have been catastrophic! Physicians, particularly surgeons and obstetricians, left without malpractice insurance or facing exorbitant premiums from the remaining insurance companies, are refusing to care for patients other than under the umbrella of the public system which covers malpractice insurance, as in Canada. (In Alberta physicians are covered in both the public and private systems).
Obstetricians say they can no longer see private patients, thus forcing pregnant women to the public system. One private hospital is refusing obstetrics altogether. Surgery lists in the private hospitals are not being reduced – they are being cancelled, with resulting layoffs and bed shortages.
As the private health system ground to a halt, the federal government, still busy calculating the cost of their HIH bailout responsibilities, had no choice but to subsidize malpractice insurance for doctors to the end of this year. And under threat of losing physicians, a 50-million-dollar package was hammered out this past week for the coming year with the government covering half of the cost of malpractice payouts over $2 million and subsidizing costly premiums for specialists deemed to be in high risk areas.
Australians quickly learned that there is only one payer. Just two months after the massive collapse of HIH insurance, the two senior executives of Insurance Corporation of Australia told the Sydney Morning Herald columnist that “The insurance industry, like any other industry, can't be held accountable for the behaviour of its competitors. It's not how our capitalist free market system works." And while admitting this causes “a serious problem in terms of our image with the public…we have a bigger problem in terms of making sure that our shareholders and our shareholder value is maintained through this problem.”
And therein lies the crux of the issue. No parallel health care system can exist without private insurances. Why would we want to trade our citizen-owned health care system for one whose primary fiduciary duty is to shareholders? And when these corporations collapse, who will pick up the pieces? After all, there is only one payer!
Of course this article is over 5 years old now.
NOW we subsidize
over 4 Billion per year on the completely corrupt and unproductive "Private health rebate" alone. And royal commissions are warning us that we are creating an unfair two tiered environment that is damaging the public health system.
And in the end the basic concept that rich people deserve better health is foul and disgusting, even in a "hybrid" system where the bottom isn't as far down.
