NORTH WEST CLINICIANS LOCKED OUT OF KEVIN RUDD’S HEALTH REFORMS
16-June-2010
A variety of the nation’s major health groups have questioned whether the Rudd Government’s so-called health reforms would meet the many promises made by the Prime Minister, Federal Member for Indi, Sophie Mirabella said.
“While the Prime Minister maintains this charade that local health professionals will have a say in how Local Hospital Networks are managed, the truth is the opposite.
“The COAG agreement signed with the States is clear, Mr Rudd and the Labor Premiers are only prepared to allow clinicians external to a Local Hospital Network on to that network’s Governing Council,” Mrs Mirabella said.
The Prime Minister’s deception was apparent last week at a Senate Committee Inquiry called by the Coalition into the COAG agreement on health and hospitals which probed the reality of Kevin Rudd’s health reforms.
The AMA told the Senate Inquiry that the States could remain firmly in the “driver’s seat” in health. The AMA President Dr Andrew Pesce said there were concerns that nothing would change - that everything could remain the same.
Dr Pesce reiterated comments in the AMA submission that the intergovernmental agreement “will not end the blame game, but instead merely provide different opportunities to undermine and ‘game’ the system”.
“There are serious question marks over Kevin Rudd’s health reforms and the public are being misled by the Rudd Government’s deceptive advertising campaign on its so-called health ‘reforms’ which promises a ‘federally funded – locally managed’ health and hospitals system,” Mrs Mirabella said.
“The campaign is misleading and simply wrong and needs to be withdrawn or at the very least changed to reflect that local does not appear to mean local.
Mrs Mirabella said the Prime Minister should come clean that he was expressly locking local clinicians out of local management.
“Just like with the mining industry, Mr Rudd is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to argue his partisan political case on health and he’s not telling people the truth,” she said.
The hearings have revealed that the Rudd ‘reforms’ were nothing more than a facade which would not change health – the states remained in charge of hospitals, the federal takeover of primary and aged care was blurry at best and all that Kevin Rudd was doing was pouring billions of extra dollars into the State Government’s to enable him to say he was ‘reforming’ health.
“It looks like business as usual for the foreseeable future.”