Abbott, Rudd, debates and health:

David McRae, a public health professional in Victoria, writes: Re. “The questions journos forgot to ask at the National Press Club” (yesterday, item 2). Abbott and the present journalists failed to ask a lot of important things at the National Press Club. Melissa Sweet does well to pick up on a few of them.

Health is 50% or more about how we live our lives on a daily basis — e.g. eat, drink,  avoid exposure to environmental chemicals, rest and relax, exercise, and manage stress.
It is much more about this than whether we have easy access to complex surgery, or a merry-go-round of pharmaceutical treatments.

Unfortunately, as far as Melissa got in addressing this in her article was:

Given the wealth of evidence that it is primary care and prevention which lay the foundations for both an equitable efficient health system and a healthier population — why is your government so focused on hospitals?

Why is your government, Mr Rudd, so focussed on hospitals, to the virtual exclusion of everything else, indeed?

Also, since there is evidence that Australians are consulting non-medical practitioners in massive numbers, why no mention of supporting those forms of health care in the debate. Some studies have suggested that there are as many visits to  naturopaths, chiropractors, and several other disciplines, per year, as there are to GPs.  This is very very expensive for those people who find they only get results with particular illnesses if they go down this path.

It is a major burden on the society and should be appreciated and addressed by government.  Never mind that the Aust Medical Association and several other slightly nutty health bodies would advise the Prime Minister to ban all of those disciplines, and burn the practitioners at the stake!

Wes Pryor, Handicap International – South Asia, writes: Anyone would think the current health reform discourse is mostly about gastrointestinal parasites — the worm (and the occasional bandicoot) — but Melissa Sweet reminds us it is, or at least should be, far broader.

To many of us in the broader “medical and human services fields”, including rehabilitation professionals working in outpatient care, private practice and in my case, humanitarian development, the focus on hospitals a little offensive at best, and potentially fatal at worst. Ms. Sweet rightly (if only virtually) probed Mr. Rudd on his “shaky” knowledge of primary care.

In fairness, primary care is pretty hard to grasp for the average pundit, and Mr. Rudd continues to do little to convince me or anyone else he’s much more than just that kind of pundit (but I know Minister Roxon to be pretty fluent in these matters). But the potential issue is far greater unless “disability” forms part of the discourse.

Roughly speaking, 10% of people have some form of disability, and the number is probably far greater if certain medical conditions, both acute and chronic are considered “disabling”. The main needs of persons with disabilities cannot be met in hospitals (except when they get sick), so the preventative and rehabilitative components of health reform cannot be overlooked if the current reforms are to be a genuine “whole of life” package. We’re glad you’re wounds have healed, Mr. Smith, now bugger off and let someone else have your bed.

So far the debate has been so medically-driven, we’d be forgiven for taking home a message that people get sick, they go to a hospital and see a Doctor and maybe a few nurses, they get better — then go home to their working families. In fact, that’s just a small part of the whole story, and leaves out the experience of entering the system (primary care) and resuming their lives in the community with or without ongoing care (rehabilitation) as effectively as possible, taking into account whatever residual disabilities or disabling conditions remain.

At the very least, let’s be honest and call this “Medical and Hospital reform”. Health is more than not being sick, and the economics and politics of funding arrangements is so utterly unimportant compared with the potential to truly reflect on the broader meaning of health and wellness in Australia.

Martin Gordon writes: Re. “The sweet science of debates: Abbott showed up for wrong fight” (yesterday, item 1). Why do we have the worm with serious political debates? The predicative quality of the worm is near useless.

Using material from the psephological site The Poll Bludger, of eight elections where it was used between 1984 and 2007, the worm predicted two liberal wins out of four (96 and 98), and three ALP wins out of four (90, 93, 07), and wrong three out of eight (84, 01, 04), and if you take account of the two party preferred vote it was wrong two out of eight times (90, 98).

It has only being completely “accurate” three out of eight times (93, 96, 07). The worm appears to slightly favour the ALP, picking them five times when they won only four. Flip a coin next time.

Andrew Haughton writes: Bernard Keane uses the phrase “float like a butterfly ,sting like a bee” re. Tony Abbott’s boxing and political skills. There’s a lot more Mike Tyson than Muhammad Ali about Abbott. He has the strategic nous of a rhinoceros.

John Kotsopoulos writes: Re. Yesterday’s editorial. Crikey wrote:

If Abbott can’t provide an alternative, the lunching hacks needed to land a punch. None did. Despite the fact that Labor’s policy statement on fixing the health system stands as a shell of what’s needed.

Well he has a plan to fix the hospitals mess which successive Governments have tried to do by throwing ever larger amounts of money around.  Fix that problem or get close to it then you have the funds to do what is on the rest of your wish list.  It is carping at its worst to pick on Rudd for not pretending to have a magic wand to fix every problem in the health system in one fell swoop.

Brett Gaskin writes: Thanks John Shailer (yesterday, comments)  for your comedy piece yesterday.

Indeed the press need to be more balanced and impartial.  Would that include The Australian, Herald-Sun, Daily Telegraph, i.e. all News Ltd — who have the vast majority of newspaper sales in the country.  There’s no doubt the likes of Bolt, Ackerman, Albrechtsen, Devine, Sheridan, Henderson, et al always provide balanced and impartial reporting.

Now let’s consider the commercial TV networks.  Do they deliver nuanced reporting based on facts and in depth investigation?  Or are they more likely to go for sensationalist reporting on refugees, law and order, and interest rates?  Which side of politics is more likely to benefit from such reporting?

John — if you don’t like hearing something that contradicts your view of the world, stick to Bolt and Fox News.  A lot of other people out there actually appreciate reporting that is not based on a press release from either political party.

Unfortunately, as Crikey‘s recent press / PR articles have shown, such fare is becoming rarer by the day.

Don Dowell writes: So John Shailer , the Liberal Party as pointed out by Bernard Keane, goes all-out to stack the on-line polls for the result of the debate, and you wonder why everyone is ignoring those polls. It’s all so unfair.

Banks:

Jim Hart writes: Another day, another bank conspiracy. Beryce Nelson (yesterday, comments), if the pump at your servo puts an extra 2 cents of fuel in your tank then you should pay for it.

If you pay with cash any rounding evens out at the end of the day for both you and for the retailer. If you pay on the card then the exact amount goes through the bank and onto your statement — again you pay what you should. If you pay that off in cash, a few cents may get rolled over to the next month. It’s not lost but if it worries you just transfer funds from your savings account instead of cash — no rounding and it will teach those bank bastards not to try and hijack your pennies.

But wait — there’s a Big Oil conspiracy too! Those pumps “seem programmed to go just over the dollar each time.” And in return you get to drive an extra 200 metres or so. But if a drop more fuel in your tank really matters then you need faster reflexes on the trigger, or simply use the preset button.

And wear an alfoil hat too, just in case.

Working families:

Moira Smith writes: Denise Marcos wrote (yesterday, comments):

The Prime Minister must drop the exclusionary ‘working families’ tag … Government policy affects everybody in Australia — not merely ‘working families’.

Yes you’re right, this mawkish phrase implies that “unless a person is employed and familial” they are irrelevant. As a single person who has, and has not, been able to work, it annoys me too.

Alas, it goes back years before Rudd. However …. every time single people get whacked with taxes for other people’s kids’ childcare, schooling etc, I try to remember that the older and more decrepit I become, the more I’ll need well-brought up, educated and hopefully working younger people around me.

The principle is OK, but you’re right, the rhetoric is getting increasingly tired and discriminatory.

The government:

John Goldbaum writes: It’s a slow day in a  dusty  little Australian town. The sun is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from down south is driving through town, stops at the  local motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

He gives him keys to a few rooms and as soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the  $100 bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

  • The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer.
  • The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.
  • The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his  drinks bill at the local pub.
  • The publican slips the money along to the local pr-stitute  drinking at the bar , who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer  him  “services” on credit.
  • The hooker rushes to the  motel and pays off her room bill to the  motel owner with the $100 .
  • The motel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything.

However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Australian Government is conducting business today…