Health “efficiency” means murder

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release 9th of March 2010


Health “efficiency” means murder

The stated goal of the Rudd government’s federal health takeover—increased “efficiency”—means more institutionalised, bureaucratic mass murder, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood charged today.

“The issue is resources,” Mr Isherwood said. “Anything less than a massive injection of resources into the health system, meaning more money, doctors, nurses and beds, will continue to condemn vulnerable people to avoidable deaths.
“They will continue to be murdered, by the system.”

Mr Isherwood blasted Rudd’s adoption of Victoria’s Casemix funding model:
“Both major parties have blood on their hands, when it comes to health,” he said.

“Jeff Kennett and the Liberals/Nationals gutted Victoria’s public health system by introducing Casemix to slash funding; now Rudd holds up Victoria as a model of efficiency, and wants to impose that nationwide.

“Meanwhile, look at Rudd’s own role in public health: he earned the moniker ‘Dr Death’ as chief bureaucrat in Queensland when he restructured that state and its health system in the early 1990s, which put Queenslanders at the mercy of a real ‘Dr Death’ in Bundaberg.

“The first Royal Commissioner into Bundaberg’s ‘Dr Death’ case blamed the travesty on a health system so bureaucratised that only an estimated 20-25 per cent of health funding was spent on patient care.”

Mr Isherwood pointed out that successive governments in all states and federally have gotten away with destroying the health system, because the public largely accepted the fraudulent argument that costs had to be contained.
“The people who make the arguments about reducing costs are liars—they are the ones who loaded the system with enormous bureaucracies, and enabled private corporations to profit enormously from health spending.

“Don’t ever accept the lie that health costs have to be controlled, because you are accepting that the system has the right to kill you,” he warned.
“If the health system is getting ‘too expensive’, the problem is the state of the economy—if an economy can’t afford to take care of its people’s health, it proves that economy isn’t prosperous, it’s collapsing.

“Fix the economic collapse—don’t kill people.”

Mr Isherwood called for the immediate implementation of the CEC’s legislation for financial system restructuring and a national bank, as well as its economic development program to generate real economic wealth, which he insisted is a prerequisite for successfully fixing the health crisis.

Click here for previous CEC reports on Australian health care.

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