Beds not bureaucrats can ease health crisis

The Australian ^ | July 28, 2009 | Jeremy Sammut

[myknowledge]

RUDD should invest in a voucher scheme instead of taking over hospitals.

IT'S a quarter of a century since Medicare was established, but no one is celebrating. No wonder, considering the critical condition of the public hospital system throughout Australia.

Instead we have a 300-page reform blueprint from the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission.

At least the report has identified the main problem. The reality is that Australia's dangerously overcrowded public hospitals don't have enough beds to provide a safe and timely standard of care even for emergency patients. Unfortunately, the commission has strongly supported a range of non-solutions. The primary care reforms it proposes will not help our dysfunctional state-run public hospitals cope with an inexorable rise in demand from an ageing population.

Since 1983 the state health bureaucracies that are responsible for allocating funding, planning services and rationing public hospital care have cut the number of public hospital beds by one-third: from 74,000 beds to just over 54,000. This is a 60 per cent cut, taking population growth into account, from 4.8 public acute beds for every 1000 Australians to 2.5 beds.

Overcrowding occurs when bed occupancy exceeds 85 per cent in hospitals, operating near or beyond full capacity. Average bed occupancy in most leading metropolitan public hospitals is above 90per cent and hospitals routinely operate above 100 per cent occupancy because of political pressure to reduce electorally sensitive waiting times for elective surgery.

The nationwide bed shortage means one-third of emergency patients wait longer than eight hours for a bed to become available. Emergency staff spend more than one-third of their time caring for these patients, which leads to more than 30 per cent of patients not being seen in emergency departments within the recommended time.

[myknowledge]

What's the correct solution?

Supply more hospitals with beds, beds, beds!

Not give complete control of the already-sick Australian healthcare system to Kevin Rudd and his bureaucrat cronies.

This could be Ruddcare.

Does this sound familiar to Obamacare?

[The Great RJ]

Interesting that reducing the number of hospital beds and the growth of new technologies like CT scanners was the centerpiece of government health planning programs in the 1970s. The goal was to reduce “excess” hospital beds to a government set standard of 4 beds per thousand population and prevent expensive new technologies from proliferating. Fortunately this legislation was allowed to lapse during the Reagan administration. Had this program continued we would likely would be having the same problem as Australia.

[3niner]

The free market works best. Here are my suggested reforms:

1) Eliminate the income tax (tax deductibility of insurance premiums becomes irrelevant).

2) Eliminate employer paid insurance plans (everybody buys the coverage they want).

3) Eliminate cost shifting by medical providers (no free care for anybody).

4) Allow patients to choose a lower recovery standard for malpractice. Patients could choose the current legal standard, or agree ahead of time that any malpractice claims would be limited to actual damages, and require real evidence of malpractice.

These changes would cause the cost of medical care to drop to a fraction of what it is now. Administrative costs would plummet, litigation costs would plummet, defensive medicine costs would plummet, and the basic charges would be fair, because they wouldn't include payment for deadbeats.