Is there a crisis in the NSW Public Hospital system?

I recently reviewed the file of a patient in a NSW public hospital. He was an elderly man who presented in a confused state. He was a chronic alcoholic with long-term, alcohol-related brain damage. His life involved going to his local club to eat two meals a day, and drinking himself into a stupor every night. He was single. During a lengthy hospital stay, he had one visit from a drinking mate. The likelihood he … more

Generic Medicines

Introduction Generic medicines are not usually newsworthy in Australia. They seldom achieve the level of public awareness that they do in the United States where many patients have to pay full cost for their medicines and selection of a generic product may result in a substantial cost saving. Several factors have made generic medicines newsworthy recently. The first and the most obvious is the publicity given to the mandatory (but rather small) 12.5 per cent … more

This week in the Policy Portal

Two important articles have been added to the Health Policy Portal this week. Is there a crisis in NSW hospitals? by Brad Frankum Director of Medicine for Macarthur Health in NSW, Dr Brad Frankum, speaks from his heart about his concerns – a wasteful use of resources, media sensationalism, micro-management from above and professional abdication of responsibility. His insights are frank and disturbing. Brad Frankum’s article can be read here Generic Medicines by David Henry. … more

 

How do we define fair?

Can we advance Australian Society and Human Civilisation? In asking what is fair and whether we can support a fairer Australia Eva Cox highlights issues and values which many of us thought had become enshrined in Australian life. But as she rightly observes, two decades of neoliberal cant has lessened expectations of our government and changed the way we think about our society. To some, government involvement now equates with coercion. Private and commercial is … more

Is Australia’s egalitarian society slipping away?

An egalitarian society can be defined as one which looks after its poor and treats them with dignity, actively discourages all forms of discrimination, widely shares the benefits of rising national productivity, allows its workers an adequate say in the workplace on matters affecting their wellbeing, and strives hard to achieve 'equality of starting opportunity' (i.e. where income and quality of life differentials in the market place are due overwhelmingly to differences in personal capacities, … more

Where do we start?

I have few objections to any of the articles I have read in the Centre for Policy Development about fairness, distributional justice, or broad questions of social policy. There is a widespread constituency which shares these views and, as is plain, nearly all those who write for and to the Centre for Policy Development are part of that constituency. The puzzle for me is how to develop these views persuasively for those who are not … more

 

Dog whistle welfare

The Federal government has offered us a package of welfare changes placing new obligations on certain recipients of social security payments. The rhetoric is impeccable populism, playing into the well known negatives of welfare: single parents and those presumed to be exaggerating disabilities with murky images of young unmarried mothers with multiply fathered children and faked injuries, Mediterranean backs and other long term negative welfare myths. Of course there will be public acceptance of the … more

Pharmacies and Competition

The recent Productivity Commission final report on the review of national competition policy reforms (Feb 2005), pages 261-265, link www.pc.gov.au , draws attention to the numerous licensing, ownership, location and advertising restrictions which severely limit competition in the pharmacy sector. The report concludes that ‘pharmacy restrictions potentially impose large costs on consumers, taxpayers and the wider community’. A new Commonwealth Government agreement with the pharmacy sector must be completed by June 30, 2005. The Pharmaceutical … more

Labor’s Malaise and What to Do About It: Mending the ALP

Keeping the ALP on course and effective has never been easy. The battle to preserve its social-democratic identity and integrity has had to be fought and fought again. The problem in the past has been would-be takeovers, both from within and without. In the 1930s – to go back no further – it was the Langites in NSW and their allies elsewhere who had to be overcome, in the 1940s the communists, in the 1950s … more