Twisted logic hijacks healthcare debate

REPUBLICANS and vested interests are throwing all they have at Obama's reforms.
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Health ID cards unleash ’scary’ Little Brothers

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Will US healthcare reform pass?

Reminiscent of the infamous Aussie election worm, Slate has created a fancy 'whipometer' with a quivering arrow to judge how likely it is that Barack Obama can get US health care reform passed.
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Abbott Doorstop - Health Reform Announcement

Subjects: Health reform announcement.

Joint Doorstop

E&OE

TONY ABBOTT:

Ok, I’m very pleased to be here with the Shadow Health Minister, Peter Dutton, just to offer an initial response to the announcement earlier today from the government. Everyone likes the idea of more health professionals, we all like that idea, but as always the devil is in the detail. This is a government which is very good at announcements, but very bad at programme delivery and you’ve got to suspect that this is another case of the government being all announcement and no follow through.

There are two particular issues that I want to focus on. Its all very well to announce extra millions for medical training places but to get the training places, you’ve got to have arrangements in place with the state governments, with the universities, with the public hospitals and with the medical profession, because none of this training can be delivered without an appropriate clinical setting and already the public hospitals are under great strain. In order to effectively deliver this training you’ve got to have the senior doctors who will act as the trainers, you’ve got to have the state governments who are prepared to put in their funding to make sure the registrars are available and can get paid and you’ve got to have the infrastructure to make sure that it will all work and what we’ve seen from this Prime Minister over the last few weeks in particular, is ending the blame game to be sure, its been replaced by the bullying game. Anyone who has been watching the footage of the Prime Minister and the state premiers would know that co-operation between them has all but broken down. That picture of the Prime Minister and Premier Keneally did not lie in the way that press releases can so easily be misleading.

The other point that I should make is that, yes there are a lot of dollars in this announcement today but you’ve got to ask yourself how much of this money is actually new money. There has been a lot of money for medical and health training in the COAG pipeline for quite some time, including from the time of the former government and it would be good to know from the government, how much of this really is new.

The other thing that would be good to hear from the government is how much of this money is going to have to be recouped from savings elsewhere in the health budget, because the last thing that patients and health professionals would welcome is an increase in medical training if its going to lead to cuts in other parts of the health budget, because its the whole of the health budget that is under pressure, it’s the whole of the health system which is under pressure, not just the workforce which is under pressure.

PETER DUTTON:

Just a couple of points. Today was the first time that Kevin Rudd and Nicola Roxon acknowledged the good work that Tony Abbott had done when he was Health Minister. The projections are over the next five years, the number of medical graduates will double and that’s the reason for extra training places. Of course what they neglected to say but what needed to be said in that press release was that all of those training places, all of those university places were created under the Howard government.

This is a case which every day in Question Time you see the government trying to bag the record of the Coalition government on health and it doesn’t stand up. By their own admission by way of press release today, they acknowledge that none of these university places were created by the Rudd government – all of them were created in the time that we were in government, that the Coalition was in government and that Tony Abbott was the Health Minister. So when you cut through the rhetoric and understand the situation as it is, it paints a very different picture to the spin that Mr Rudd goes on with.

I also want to point out, too, another couple of realities. The reality is that when Mr Rudd makes promises on health, he never delivers on them. If you look at they’re bringing the nurses back into the workforce programme, they promised about 7,500 places over four years. In 18 months, they’ve delivered 500 nurses into that programme, a massive failure. They promised 36 GP super clinics. After two-and-a-half years, they’ve delivered on two of them. They delivered promises of extra beds, of more doctors, none of that has happened over the last two-and-a-half years. Mr Rudd when he was chief bureaucrat in Queensland as you all know closed hospital beds down.

So, when you cut through all the hype, the travelling road show that is the Prime Minister and look at what his promises, as to what he delivers in health, there is a very, very big difference and that’s why I think today is significant, that for the first time Mr Rudd is acknowledging that Tony Abbott did a great job as Health Minister.

QUESTION:

I think you must’ve just made a mistake, just to clarify here. You said that Tony Abbott created the university positions and the training places, that’s not true.

PETER DUTTON:

University. So the training places come online at the time of graduation. It’s the university places, that’s right.

QUESTION:

But they needed to be funded, didn’t they? Or else there’s no point in having student graduates?

TONY ABBOTT:

Look, obviously it was very important to increase the size of the health workforce and just in a nutshell, under the Howard government there was a 50 per cent increase in medical student numbers, there was a 30 per cent increase in nursing student places and there was a 30 per cent increase in GP training places. Now, the graduates are now starting to come out of that very big expansion of the university health professional training programme and it is to capitalise on the good work of the Howard government that the current government is doing what it announced today.

QUESTION:

But Mr Abbott, isn’t the fact that you were actually correcting a mistake of the Howard government in its early days by freezing the number of places and you were correcting a situation that was getting worse and worse?

TONY ABBOTT:

That’s not actually true, Paul. Medical school places were frozen in the early 80’s by the Hawke government and medical student places basically didn’t expand from the early 80’s until the late 90’s and then beginning with Michael Wooldridge and Kay Patterson, but accelerating dramatically when I was the Health Minister, we had this massive expansion. In fact, there were nine new medical schools created under the Howard government, most of which in my time as Health Minister.

QUESTION:

So isn’t this just a natural extension of that good work, then?

TONY ABBOTT:

The interesting thing about this government is it’s big on announcements but it’s bad on follow through. They’re good at announcing new policy, they’re very poor at delivering. As I said before, Mr Rudd is all hat and no cowboy. He’s all announcement and no follow through and none of what is announced today is going to make any big difference any time soon and that’s assuming that he’s got the arrangements in place with the State governments and with the various medical training bodies to make it work, and given the Rudd government’s absolutely appalling record at programme delivery, typified by the pink batts programme, you’ve got to really doubt whether there’s anything of great substance behind today’s announcement.

QUESTION:

Well, then how do you actually tackle chronic workforce shortages?

TONY ABBOTT:

We tackle chronic workforce shortages by training more people at universities and by then ensuring that they have got the appropriate professional training. I’m not questioning the principle of more training. What I’m questioning today is whether the Rudd government has done the homework that’s needed to really deliver these places and whether it has the competence in follow-up to make sure that what is supposed to happen really does happen in practice.     

QUESTION:

You would know form your own experience it’s very difficult to get agreements with medical specialist colleges to provide the specialists to oversee the training, isn’t it?

TONY ABBOTT:

Look, it’s not easy, which is one of the reasons why it is a big mistake for the Prime Minister to pat himself on the back, say ‘I’ve made an announcement, problem solved.’ There are all sorts of issues in the health sector which are extremely difficult to address in any permanent way. Basically these are issues that you’ve got to keep returning to again and again and again. Almost everything in health is a work in progress. You can only make a difference in health through sustained application and commitment. You can only make a difference in health if you have the capacity to actually focus on this for the long term.

The problem with the Rudd government is that while the Prime Minister is focused the government is engaged, but the Prime Minister finds it almost impossible to focus on anything for any length of time. I mean, let’s face it, now he wants to say that health and hospitals are the big issues but it was only a couple of months ago when he was telling us that the greatest moral challenge of our time was climate change.

QUESTION:

Mr Abbott, are you going to be champion of the State Labor Premiers? I mean, you were very frustrated with them as Health Minister, you wanted to take over their hospitals. Now you’re saying that Rudd’s bullying them. Perhaps they need a bit of bullying?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, the interesting thing is that it was in fact Mr Rudd who said that he was going to end the blame game, but plainly what he’s done is ramped up the blame game and indeed replaced it with the bullying game as we saw on graphic display with Premier Keneally last week.

QUESTION:

Mr Abbott, you’ve been very critical of Kevin Rudd’s hospital funding plan. Would you be urging your Liberal counterparts at a State level, in West Australia and, should they be successful, in South Australia and Tassie, to oppose it?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, I would be urging everyone to be deeply sceptical of the promises that this government makes given its appalling record when it comes to actual programme delivery. I mean, the big question for the Australian public is why would you trust Kevin Rudd to fix the public hospital systems when he’s made such a hash of everything else that he’s done, most notably the pink batts programme.

Thank very much. Thank you.  

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Urgent, risky and complex

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KEVIN Rudd and Nicola Roxon have swung the election year decisively to Labor's terrain of health and hospitals with a reform blueprint that is risky, complex and a huge change in power within Australia's system of government.
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abare.gov.au

The final stages of World Trade Organisation Doha Round negotiations are a question of basic political will, delegates at the ABARE Outlook conference in Canberra heard today. 'There needs to be a serious investment in political capital to restart the negotiations. 'Departing from the single undertaking and pursuing agricultural negotiations through a critical mass framework with as few as 35 WTO members would cover more than 80 per cent of global trade in the most important agricultural commodities, and produce an outcome that would likely be more economically important than the Doha Round approach.
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My life as an unqualified, untrained government insider

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Healthcare IT Dilemma: iPad Lust Meets Software Reality

In addition to being a top priority for legislators and the press, healthcare has become a major target for IT vendors. Driven by economic pressures that force hospitals to merge and consolidate, regulations that force better documentation and security, and legislation that may fundamentally change the industry's business models, healthcare companies will spend more on technology this year than any other type of company, according to a study released Jan. 31 by Enterprise Strategy Group.
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Health change deniers

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Darwin Radiation Oncology facility

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New GP Plus Super Clinics in SA

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New e-health bill for better patient care

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$53M health precinct for Queensland

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Super clinic boosts chronic disease care

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New breast screening technology

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Next phase of sexual health campaign

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Important health reforms for 2010

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$15M extra for specialised drugs

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Scholarships for health professionals

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Community Pharmacy Agreement

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State-of-the-art breast cancer equipment

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New cancer equipment for Coffs

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Community support services

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