Health
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DAVID CHARLES. Venture Capital and Start Ups – Is Berlin an example for Australian capital cities?
During a visit to Berlin in mid September this year I was struck by the way the venture capital and start up scene in Berlin had shifted from being something of an exotic hothouse flower to one of the leading places for new business creation in Germany and indeed Europe. Ernst and Young in Continue reading »
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IAN McAULEY. The Mounting Case For A Royal Commission Into Banks And Insurance Companies
An overwhelming majority of Australians support a Royal Commission into the finance sector. Ian McAuley explains why. We’re paying too much for a bloated financial service sector.A prominent example is Australia’s largest health insurer, Medibank Private, which in the last financial year absorbed just over a billion dollars of contributors’ premiums in management overheads and Continue reading »
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PETER WHITEFORD. The $4.8 trillion dollar question: will an ‘investment approach’ to welfare help the most disadvantaged?
Social Services Minister Christian Porter on Tuesday released a report on the lifetime costs of the social security system for the Australian population, putting it at close to A$4.8 trillion. The report was an initiative of the 2015-16 budget, when the government allocated A$33.7 million to establish an Australian Priority Investment Approach to Welfare Continue reading »
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The creeping Americanisation of Australian healthcare.
In this blog, I have repeatedly posted articles about the threat to Medicare in the $11 billion pa. subsidy which the Australian government provides to support private health insurance companies in Australia. We are sleep walking into the destruction of Medicare unless we reverse this trend. The US health system dependent upon private health insurance Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. ‘Aunty, with our prospects in life – what is the point of being healthy?’
The ABC Boyer Lecture series this year is being delivered by Sir Michael Marmot, the World Medical Association President and Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London .The main thrust of his lecture series has been about inequalities, poverty and social conditions – the social determinants – that have a major Continue reading »
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PATRICK McGORRY. We must settle the refugees before it is too late.
In this article in the SMH, Patrick McGorry, the President of the Society for Mental Health Research, says; The time has come, before it is too late, to re-settle these fellow human beings and not just the children, but all of those who qualify as genuine refugees and who deserve a second chance for life. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Medicare, Private Health Insurance and the ALP
In my article, ‘Down a different path in Melbourne: how Medibank was conceived’ written in 2000 for the Medical Journal of Australia (see link below), I described the history from 1967 to 1975 which led to Medibank/Medicare. In that article, I highlighted one issue that drove Gough Whitlam’s determination to establish Medibank/Medicare. His concern was Continue reading »
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WALTER HAMILTON. Minamata Remembered
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the methyl mercury poisoning in Japan that caused ‘Minamata Disease’. Shocking images of victims captured by the American photographer W. Eugene Smith (his Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath perhaps the best known) have served ever since as a warning to the world of the threat from industrial Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Medicare – the Labor Party does not understand its own creation.
It is claimed that at the last Federal election, the Coalition lost support because it was going to undermine Medicare. In fact, at the last election, the ALP was proposing to do more to undermine Medicare than the Coalition. Let me explain. Continue reading »
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ROBERT REICH: Why a Single-Payer Healthcare System is Inevitable
Private markets for health insurance pose a structural problem, and Obamacare can’t fix it. Continue reading »
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IAN WEBSTER. Malcolm Turnbull and homelessness – reaching mentally ill people
This week our PM, Malcolm Turnbull, was admonished when he gave $5 to a homeless man in Melbourne. He was sorry if people thought he should not have done this. He said, “I felt sorry for the guy”….”there but for the grace of God go I.” George Orwell wrote after being ‘down and out’ Continue reading »
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PETER GIBILISCO. Some key ideas for the next generation of disability activists.
1. Meritocracy Meritocracy is a belief that seems to me to still be alive and well in the senior management of disability support. It also seems to drive many aspects of public policy, particularly when appeals are made to “equal opportunity”. Advocates of a meritocratic approach to disability policy are still assuming that the Continue reading »
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JOHN DWYER. A shared vision for restructuring primary care in Australia.
At last the clouds are dispersing, the sun is shining through and one can see a splendid vision of a restructured primary health system that meets the needs of contemporary Australia. For the first time that I can remember, there is a consensus among informed consumers and health professionals that enthusiastically supports the introduction Continue reading »
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IAN McAULEY. Health care and Labor.
In the recent election Labor had fine words on health care – “Labor will ensure that access to health care is determined by your Medicare card, and not your credit card” – but in reality its policy proposals, if implemented, would have been even more destructive of Medicare than the Coalition’s. The Coalition, true Continue reading »
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IAN McAULEY. Problems of Private Health Insurance.
The PHI industry continues to make two invalid assumptions about private health care. The first is that governments are intrinsically high cost and bureaucratic and that the private sector is unquestionably more efficient. This is patently not true. The least efficient health service in the world, the US, is based on private health insurance and Continue reading »
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PETER YOUNG. Speaking of Freedom: Human rights and mental health in detention.
Peter Young is a member of Doctors for Refugees who have launched a High Court challenge against the Secrecy Provisions in the Border Force Act which states that an ‘entrusted person’ who discloses protected information can face up to two years in prison. I am reposting below an earlier article that Peter Young contributed to Continue reading »
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LESLEY BARCLAY. Diagnosing rural health gaps in the election.
The Coalition represents most rural electorates in Australia. But we seldom hear of much concern about their constituents who have poor health and poor health services. this is a repost of an earlier article by Lesley Barclay about the problems of rural health. John Menadue. It is timely as the federal election approaches to consider Continue reading »
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JOHN DWYER. Medicare and the 45th Parliament.
Clearly the future of Medicare was the election issue of greatest importance for most Australians. Community concern was focussed on the possibility that the primary care they receive from their general practitioner might be privatised such that a superior service would be available to those who paid more, either directly or though the extension Continue reading »
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CHRISTINE DUFFIELD & MARY CHIARELLA. The predicted nursing shortage: strategies and solutions
The nursing workforce The nursing workforce comprises 3 regulated groups: Nurse Practitioners (NPs), Registered Nurses (RNs) and Enrolled Nurses (ENs). Nurses recognise that other unregulated groups of healthcare workers (for example Assistants in Nursing (AINs)) perform nursing care, and the research is clear that they require support from registered nurses (Duffield et al, 2014). Continue reading »
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IAN WEBSTER. Health care for aged people is increasingly complex.
From his experience in intensive care in one of Australia’s busiest intensive care units at Liverpool Hospital in Southwest Sydney, Professor Ken Hillman describes the failure of specialised, super-specialised, medicine to deal appropriately and humanely with seriously ill aged persons and those whose life has run its course. (Ageing and end-of-life issues, posted 9/7/2016 Continue reading »
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PETER GIBILISCO. Five years in retrospect: Life without control
I look back on the last five years and come to a sad conclusion. For some considerable time, I have been losing control of my movements. But from July 2011 there has occurred a progressive loss of control that is potentially more fundamental than the biological loss of muscular power. It has not been Continue reading »
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KATHY CHAPMAN & BRIDGET KELLY. Unhealthy sport sponsorship continues to target kids.
In the final month of the countdown to the Olympic Games, our sports stars are probably not eating and drinking the Games sponsors’ foods. Again, as in previous Olympics, the Olympic Games sponsors are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Cadburys, whose foods and drinks are not good choices for athletes due to their lack of nutrition and Continue reading »
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KEN HILLMAN. Ageing and end of life issues.
It is well known that our population is living longer. But has our health system adapted to this ageing population? Do the elderly fit into the construct of a single diagnosis? Can we identify those who are coming to the end of their life? Do we ask them if they would prefer to spend the Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. What the major parties ignored in the election?
The election seemed more about avoiding some key issues than a contest of values and ideas. Because so many key issues such as refugees were avoided, it is not surprising that so many voters, about one third, turned their backs on the major parties. Some issues like the NBN were widely canvassed in social Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Privatisation of Medicare has been underway for years.
In this blog before the election, I highlighted the risks to Medicare in many posts. See links below: John Menadue. Privatisation and the hollowing out of Medicare. David Pope. Medicare – Eaten out from within. Ian McAuley. Bill Shorten is right: Malcolm Turnbull is a major threat to Medicare. Lesley Russell. It is disingenuous of Continue reading »
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It is disingenuous of the Coalition to claim it has no intention of privatising Medicare.
The election campaign battle over Medicare should come as no surprise. It echoes disputes during previous campaigns and have their origins in ideological divides that date back to well before Medicare was founded and have persisted through the subsequent political disputes. Labor sees the health of Australians as a matter of sufficient national importance that Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Saving Medicare.
In an earlier article in this blog, I outlined how Medicare is under threat but not for the reasons outlined by Bill Shorten. The threat is the erosion of Medicare from within by the power of vested interests and in this case, private health insurance. This vested interests wants to bend Medicare to its Continue reading »
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GREIG CRAFT. Drinking and Driving: a global problem.
Global Problem Alcohol, drugs and driving simply do not go together. Driving requires a person’s attentiveness and the ability to make quick decisions on the road, to react to changes in the environment and execute specific, often difficult maneuvers behind the wheel. When drinking alcohol, using drugs, or being distracted for any reason, driving becomes dangerous Continue reading »
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RAY MOYNIHAN. Drug companies are buying doctors – for as little as a $16 meal.
An important new study in the United States has found doctors who receive just one cheap meal from a drug company tend to prescribe a lot more of that company’s products. The damming findings demonstrate the value of new transparency laws in the US, and remind Australians we’re still very much in the dark about Continue reading »
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ALEX WODAK. Global drug prohibition and national security
Buddhists say that everything has a cause and everything has an effect. Violence, oppressed minorities, rampant corruption and failed states are both causes and effects of global drug prohibition. Serious threats to national security are an important but rarely discussed cost of drug prohibition. Continue reading »