Healthcare refroms in Australia

Comments on Jennifer Hewett “Non-delivery on policy makes Labor vulnerable”, 2/03/2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/non-delivery-on-policy-makes-labor-vulnerable/story-e6frg9if-1225835850302

So far from some of the leaks on Rudd health reform plan seem to suggest that it is likely to be equally disappointing, with still too many layers of bureaucracies, albeit with another layer of regional health bodies in addition to the federal and State ones.

The simple matter of fact is that the federal government should have the financial resources to take over and streamline the administration of the national health system to make it much more efficiently run.

In terms of financial resources, the federal has the health care grants and the GST resources, although the latter is untied at the moment, so the States can use as they see fit. The federal government can reach an agreement with the States to have a national health care system with the removal of States' finance and administration responsibilities by reduce the amount of GST to the States by the corresponding amount of their spending on public hospitals and healthcare, so the States are not losers.

The federal health department should not directly administer individual hospitals like Howard/Abbott did for the Tasmania one. Instead, it should be focused on standard, evaluation, training, creating the best incentives for all people involved in the system and fair funding allocation.

With the federal government taking full responsibility for all healthcare, including public hospitals, there will be no rooms for shifting blames.

How the hospitals should be run, they should be run by either their own board, or a regional board, depending on the size of the hospitals and their geographical distributions and the distribution of population. Those boards should be elected or selected by their regional population and healthcare professionals, especially those in the hospitals.

The department sign service agreement with those individual boards.

How can it evaluate the system? It can use independent bodies, such as the Productivity Commission, in conjunction with AMA and representatives from the relevant bodies. Funding should be based on independent evaluations.

Is that difficult? No, it is not. There is only 23 million people in Australia, the size of a large cities in some very populous countries. Why should it be difficult to run healthcare for such a population?

Why the Rudd government thinks it is difficult? Who knows?