None of us should be in any doubt that health and the growing national health bill will be significant issues for the foreseeable future. The solutions will not be easy, but there are principles which the DLP believes need to be adopted so that we’ve got the basic framework right for the future.
That principle is decentralization or, to use and old word, subsidiarity. This essentially means that decision making should occur at the lowest possible competent level. Put simply: local decisions for local needs.
When he was Health Minister, Tony Abbott made no secret of his desire for the Federal Government to take over the running of our hospital system. The Rudd/Gillard new deal on health is similar, but with a dramatic increase in bureaucracy to boot.
Kevin Rudd was right about one thing: there are problems in the system and that health can and should be delivered more equitably and efficiently. In announcing his policy, however, he did not make anything like a convincing case for a federal takeover just as he failed to show us what the efficiency dividends might be. That’s because, in our opinion, there are none.
Last week Tony Abbott announced that a Coalition government would allow local schools to manage their own Building Education Revolution projects; arguing that this would save costs and provide better outcomes. Sound familiar? Then why not in the health sector?
The DLP, like Abbott on the BER, believes that local is better and that local hospital boards can and should have the opportunity to manage their facilities with the local community in mind.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
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Bureaucracy is the problem. Too many layers and also area health services need scaling down to less functions. Then empower and fund decisions at each individual hospital. Have board members drawn based on level of expertise from doctors through to nurses and maintenance staff.
ReplyDeleteThere might be no point in going back to State funded health because of the loss of State level reputation brought on by the public's belief that some State governments have been incompetent.
So long as the Commonwealth Government directs funds after listening to individual and local hospitals and frees them up to act, things should get better.
Bureaucracy is the problem. But to leap from that statement to supporting a federal bureaucracy over the states because the state's reputation is bad defies logic. Surely the federal bureacracy is just as much, if not more of a problem.
ReplyDeleteUltimately the probelm has been the shared arrangements whereby the states blame the feds and visa versa.
A true distributist would never make such a comment!