The Policy Post

Meet Australia’s most overstretched hospital. Every major hospital in the nation is in trouble. Most were struggling to cope with ever-rising patient numbers even before the pandemic pushed them over the edge.

How the GP crisis happened – and why it will get much worse. For most of the last 25 years, there has been a war of attrition against Medicare. Nowhere are the effects more crippling than in general practice.

What’s gone wrong in mental health? For the past 50 years, governments have taken money and resources out of the mental health sector. Now, we have a ballooning crisis that disproportionately affect women, the poor, the young, and homosexual men and women.

The loneliness of the long-distance health reformer: Stephen Duckett on politics, bureaucracies and the pandemic. Anyone who still thinks Australia’s health system is fit for purpose really hasn’t been paying attention.

Thousands dying. A whole economy in chaos. Hospitals in pandemonium. Why won’t our governments do their bloody job? Almost everyone now knows that living-with-Covid isn’t working. Everyone, that is, except the people we have elected to run the country.

Labor’s plans for a whole new health system. Starting with Curtin and Chifley, every federal Labor government has redesigned the nation’s health system. Based on what they’ve said so far, this government will do the same.

Money can’t buy you love – but it can buy you life. Have you ever wondered why the British royals last so long? It’s not about genetics. Not “breeding”. It’s about a healthy, controlled lifestyle – and the most rigorous, attentive and stupendously expensive health care anywhere.

Tasmania’s disastrous health budget. During the internal discussions for the 2014 state budget, the Department of Health put a business case for upgrading the health system’s creaking and outdated computer systems.

Wear a mask and save the economy. Covid lockdowns and border closures were necessary at the time, but they caused a recession. Quickly, we went from one extreme to the other – from lockdowns to let-it-rip. Political leaders promised a sunny outlook.

Universal health care is the cheapest option. Anything less costs more. Starving the health system of money and resources is the economics of stupidity. Any savings are soon eclipsed by the massive cost to the economy, to the society and to government budgets.

A colossal all-party health FAIL ! Every element of the Australian health system is in deep dysfunction. Hospitals in every state are in greater disarray than ever before. Emergency department overcrowding alone is killing as many people as the road toll.

There’s only one way to save private hospitals.   Neither party wants to talk about it, but the crisis facing private hospitals – which provide one bed in every three in this country – is a time-bomb waiting to explode under the next government.

For Australia’s sickest hospital system, is there finally hope? The nation’s smallest state has its sickest population and its worst hospitals. There’s a reason for that, of course: it has a government which has never demonstrated it could actually give a damn.

Drug companies prevent poor countries getting vaccines. This is how they do it. Back in the 1970s the big American drug companies, led by Pfizer, were seriously worried about their continued ability to set prices for their products around the world.

Will an Albanese government fix the mess in health? Or not? Some things we know. We know the whole health system has moved beyond crisis to an apparently permanent state of declining function.

Which state has the worst hospitals? Let’s get one thing straight. No state actually has good hospitals. The whole system has been too neglected and too poorly resourced for too long.

39% of Australians can’t afford to go to the dentist. But Medicare isn’t the answer. For a country that still likes to think it has a universal health care system, the figures are shameful.

Climate change, rainforest destruction and the next pandemic. Climate change is supercharging the risk that already exists from another form of environmental destruction – uncontrolled agricultural development in tropical rainforests.

When governments get mental health policy wrong, people die. For over half a century, governments in all jurisdictions have been funnelling money out of mental health services.