Australia’s public hospitals cost too much and achieve too little. Soaring costs threaten to drown state finances while abandoning patients.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In Victoria and Tasmania, hospital managers are cutting jobs. At the Alfred in Melbourne, staff are told to turn the lights out.

Costs are increasing exponentially because staff cannot work effectively amid chaos, and because there are too many patients in expensive acute beds who don’t need that level of care.

It’s not the fault of staff or of patients. It’s the predictable result of poor, short-sighted decisions by successive state and federal governments.

For far too long, they have failed to build enough of the right hospital facilities to keep up with the ever-growing number of people needing care. Over the past two decades, the number of patients admitted to the nation’s public hospitals has exceeded the supply of beds by 38 per cent.

State authorities have been fixated on the provision of expensive acute beds, even though many thousands of people occupying these beds would be better off in more clinically appropriate step-down convalescent facilities - at a fraction of the cost.

The Commonwealth has ignored the need for major capital investment. Now the results of that neglect are hitting the federal budget too.

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