Remember the promises made by Turdy Abbott?... Now it's Turdball's turn to massage your little brain with "promises":

 

 

A recap on Medicare
 Thanks, Stephanie Anderson...
 Let's kick off the afternoon with a quick recap of what's been said about Medicare today, thanks to my colleague Andrew Greene, who is travelling with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
 Today, Mr Turnbull has given voters a "solemn commitment" that Medicare will never be privatised under a re-elected Coalition government. 
The Government formally scrapped plans to outsource Medicare's payments system over the weekend, but the Prime Minister is again battling Opposition claims that the coalition wants to privatise the agency. 
The PM insists Medicare will remain wholly in public hands, but has refused to say if it was his call to dump the plans to privatise the payments system, insisting the idea never went to cabinet.  
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, meanwhile, says the future of Medicare hinges on the election of a Labor government.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-20/election-live-june-20/7524116


Bill Shorten is correct. Yes, Malcolm wants to introduce "efficiency" into Medicare. If his efficiency is the same as his NBN, prepare for loads more of crap.

 

 

The new head of the Australian Medical Association has dealt a blow to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's claim the Government wants to privatise Medicare.

Key points:

• Dr Gannon dubs Medicare's payments system "rusty" and "antiquated"
• AMA says evidence doesn't stack up to support Labor's claims Medicare would be privatised
• Dr Gannon pleased with Labor's plans to unravel the freeze on rebates

Mr Shorten's assertion is based on the fact the Government had been considering outsourcing what Dr Michael Gannon has dubbed Medicare's "antiquated" and "rusty" payments system.

He said privatising the payments system "in no way" amounted to privatising Medicare, as Mr Shorten has claimed.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-22/election-2016-medicare-ama-bill-shorten/7531978

 

Either Dr Gannon is naive, either he is a stooge of the Liberal (CONservative) Party. Why give "private enterprise" the benefit of charging the government for something the government can do. More efficiency? Nupe... It's about giving the Liberal (CONservative) Party's mates some cash for doing the government's work for which the government already has the infrastructure. Beyond this, this is the thin wedge of slowly but surely privatising Medicare. As well, knowing that the Turnbull/Abbott/Scotmo government is now sliding towards its 1,583rd broken promises — big and small — you cannot trust one single word they say, especially when Turnbull says you can "have his word"... They talk deceptive bullcrap.

And shame on the ABC for saying "the new head of the Australian Medical Association has dealt a blow to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's claim the Government wants to privatise Medicare". The ABC is wrong and Bill Shorten is correct. The privatisation of Medicare has been on the wish list of the Libs (CONservatives) for a long time.

 

The way Malcolm and his troops are going on about Medicare should scare you. They lie. Malcolm lies. If you think that the Liberals (CONservatives) won't destroy Medicare or sell it off to private enterprise because Malcolm says so, you are naive and more useless than a box of Christmas decoration run over backwards by a Fiat Chrysler SUV. Malcolm will go on the rampage and do like his mate Mike Baird in New South Wales where everything has been for sale including many Liberal (CONservative) politicians to property developers giving cash through various illegal conduits. Mike has sold off on public buildings, lands and services. HE WAS NOT ELECTED ON THIS POLICY PLATFORM. Had Mike told the truth he would not have got the gig. Simple.

Imagine that within six months, Malcolm is booted out of the PMship and replaced by either Morrison or horror Abbott, which is the choice for most HARD liberals (CONservatives) and Uncle Rupe. You will say goodbye to Medicare if you give the Liberals (CONservatives) a mandate. 

Trust old Gus here. Seen more lies from CONservatives than days in his life.

Private insurance, even when heavily regulated, cannot do what Medicare and the Australian Tax office can do so much better.

The Coalition’s proposal to outsource the Medicare payments system is only a peripheral issue, but it has provided a springboard for Shorten’s wider message that Medicare would not be safe under a Coalition government. And that’s simply because the Coalition’s track record on Medicare is poor.

At every opportunity it has used regulatory and budgetary support for private insurance (now costing public revenue $11 billion a year) to undermine Medicare, which it has tried to redefine as a charity service for the poor or indigent.

It has stuck doggedly to the mantra that private insurance relieves pressure on public hospitals, even though evidence is to the contrary (because private insurance actually draws resources away from private hospitals). And it has consistently refused to subject private health insurance to economic scrutiny.

On the basis of the Coalition’s record in office, Shorten is absolutely right in warning that Medicare as we know it is at risk if the Coalition is re-elected.

this article first appeared in New Matilda on June 21, 2016.

read more: http://johnmenadue.com/blog/?p=6863

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The destruction of Medicare is the end-game for vested interests like private health insurance. The Coalition is facilitating that process with an $11 billion pa subsidy despite what Turnbull tells us. John Menadue gives us the facts.

MALCOLM TURNBULL says that the Coalition will “never, ever, privatise Medicare”. Given the wide public support for Medicare and Malcolm Turnbull’s way with words his attempted rebuttal is not surprising.

But the Coalition has been eroding Medicare from within for a decade and a half since John Howard. The vehicle for this erosion is private health insurance (PHI) and the government is facilitating this process with the $11 billion p.a. taxpayer funded subsidy to support private health insurance.

And the ALP does not seem to care. It scarcely ever mentions the damage of PHI. Is it scared of this vested interest? 

If people want PHI, that is their right, but it should not be at the expense of others and in the process, erode Medicare.

The erosion of Medicare is proceeding rapidly which I will outline below. The danger and the threat increases every year. Steadily we are moving down the disastrous U.S. path of private health insurance with its horrific costs and unfairness. Warren Buffet has described private health insurance in the U.S. as the ‘tapeworm in the US health system’.

The Coalition‘s undermining of Medicare through PHI is insidious. It occurs in many ways. Medicare is becoming less and less a quality system available to all, regardless of income.

Bill Shorten is right: Turnbull is a major threat to Medicare, says Ian McAuley from the University of Canberra. https://t.co/MYTFLFZ6NI

— IndependentAustralia (@independentaus) June 23, 2016

 

The threat takes many forms.

• The $11 billion subsidy for PHI undermines Medicare’s principles of a single funder, universality and solidarity. The PHI subsidy goes overwhelmingly to people on higher incomes. The key and founding principle of Medicare was that quality care should be available on the basis of need and not income. The $11 billion p.a. subsidy to PHI is a violation of that principle. It enables the wealthy to jump the hospital queue regardless of need.
• We are concerned about growing health costs, particularly with an ageing population but PHI makes it much more difficult for Medicare and the government to control costs. Providers – doctors and private hospitals – have the power to set prices in the market. Multiple PHI companies make it much more difficult to control those costs. U.S. health costs are double Australia’s health costs as a proportion of GDP and this is almost entirely due to the inability of PHI to control costs. We need a health system that is efficient as well as fair. PHI results in both inefficiency and unfairness.
• The erosion of Medicare and the loss of control over costs has been greatly worsened through gap insurance provided by PHI. As a result of that gap insurance, the public is being forced to pay for the greed of specialists whose over-servicing and overcharging is facilitated by PHI.
• The erosion of Medibank means that PHI companies can foist higher costs on the community in other ways. The administrative costs of PHI are three times the costs of Medicare. These costs may be off the Commonwealth budget, but the inefficiency of PHI is still borne by policy holders. PHI companies impose their own private tax. It is called "premiums".
• PHI premium increases have been at double the CPI rate for the last 15 years. The community pays for this inefficiency of PHI.
• The political justification by the Coalition for the $11 billion subsidy for PHI is that it would take pressure off public hospitals. It has not done so. In fact, the reverse has occurred. Because of the weakening of Medicare’s ability to control costs and fees, many people on moderate incomes have been forced to go to the emergency departments of public hospitals. Most of these emergency departments have been at bursting point for years. Private health insurance has also under-written dramatic increases in salaries of specialists with the result that increasingly, clinicians in public hospitals are attracted to taking employment in private hospitals where the salaries are three to five times higher than in public hospitals. This is just another example of how PHI is hollowing out Medicare and the public system from within.
• A principle of Medicare is that quality services would be available to everyone regardless of where they live. Because PHI provides under-writing of private hospitals, this means that country people are disadvantaged. Almost all private hospitals are in urban areas. PHI clearly discriminates against people living in rural and remote Australia. The principle of universality is again eroded. The National Party allows this dudding of country people to continue.

My Medicare cartoon in today's @canberratimes
https://t.co/0163VajLU3>#ausvotes pic.twitter.com/6OvoLh7IKR

— David Pope (@davpope) June 22, 2016

 

The Minister for Health, Sussan Ley, has floated the idea that the Coalition will introduce categories of "gold, silver and bronze" to help patients better understand the many confusing and dud policies that PHI offers. But given the scale and nature of the problems outlined above, this is pure window dressing. It fails to address the erosion of Medicare by PHI.

In addition to the appalling performance of PHI, we have just learned that the ACCC is to investigate very serious breaches by Medibank Pte in failing to disclose to its 3.9 million policy holders that it was slashing coverage of pathology and radiology services just when it was floating Medibank Pte on the stock exchange.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/privatisation-and-the-hollowing-out-of-medicare,9153

Despite the Turnbull Government's insistence that it has no intention to privatise Medicare, the facts seem to indicate otherwise. Ash Ghebranious decodes one Government adviser's recent policy explanation.

WHEN TONY SHEPHERD, former chairman of Abbott's National Commission of Audit, appeared on Lateline, to discuss the Coalition Government's policy on health care, he said something in regard to what he called "outsourcing the back processing" thatEmma Alberici missed:

And the system is really clunky and old. You know, we have eight definitions of income within that system. So writing the software to make that work is difficult.

I think there is one group of pensioners — there is only 400 of them in a specific category. I mean, that just makes the system very hard to manage.

RT @slopezAU: This is the last thing I expected to be handed when going to a GP.#medicare #ausvotes #auspol pic.twitter.com/7SSQImJuvK

— John Wren (@JohnWren1950) June 27, 2016

What he is implying here, is that somehow the outsourced version of Medicare will not have eight definitions of income or, that one group of pensioners will no longer belong to a specific category.

Here is the clear falsehood. First, he claims that all this is is an outsourcing of the "back processing". Then he implies that the new system would not include categories that the Government had specifically legislated for, including categories of income tax. This is not outsourcing back processing — this is rewriting the entire system and taking clear government decisions out of government hands!

The 400 pensioners that Tony Shepard mentioned is one particular case. Is he referring to spouses of war veterans? Or people with different disabilities?

You see, what Tony Shepherd fails to understand is people are different. They do not fit in boxes. They all have to be treated as individuals, even in a very large system. He seems to see this as inefficient. And clunky. He doesn’t seem to think that people should be seen as people.

So he is not talking about "back processing". He is talking about companies that will decide what is income and what pensioners belong where.

 

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-coalitions-medicare-policy-be-afraid--be-very-afraid,9166

...

If Australia gets this decision right, the nation should enjoy the economic strength and social progress to create greater opportunities for all. Given the choice between a Coalition led by the socially progressive economic reformer Mr Turnbull, and a Shorten-led Labor party backed by reform-resistant unions, we support the election of a Turnbull government.

 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/malcolm-turnbullled-coalition-offers-economic-and-social-reform-20160629-gpv218.html#ixzz4D6jjfEsl
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook


Independent? The SMH? Always? BUGGER OFF. This is the last time I buy the Sydney Morning Herald... Go to hell. Turnbull lies better with a smile than Abbott with a stick ! The "editorial" board of the SMH bought the clever crafted bullshit, basically refusing to survey all the crap and backflips of Turdball on most important issues such as climate change, the CSIRO and education and etc. Talk is cheap. And the "Labor turmoil" (dysfunction), which the SMH is not ashamed to point out, was mostly created by stupidity and aggression of the MMMM with Murdoch press leading the charge by dangling a rabid Abbott like a monkey on a rope that you catch at a merry-go-round to win the booby prize. And to say the least the Labor "dysfunction" brought far more progressive equitable policies than the Howard/Abbott/Turnbull years combined...
Yes the Herald "Mea Culpa" is telling but the dogs at the SMH have learnt NOTHING ! Nothing ! The Liberals (CONSTIPATED CONservatives) now led by Turdball are the same mongrels that were led by Abbott. Progressive? My foot. The Turnbull team is the same team of Abbott supporters with the addition of a few ultra-right wing rabid loonies... 

The SMH mea culpa:

 

Such trust can be sadly misplaced. When the Herald supported Tony Abbott at the 2013 election we criticised his negativity. But given Labor's dysfunction at the time, we thought Mr Abbott deserved a chance to unite a "tired and despondent nation".

Mr Abbott fundamentally betrayed the nation's trust on governance, fairness, social cohesion and policy development.

Australia deserves better than that.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/malcolm-turnbullled-coalition-offers-economic-and-social-reform-20160629-gpv218.html#ixzz4D6le8NBZ
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook, 


YEP!  WE DESERVE BETTER THAN THE MALCOLM TEAM OF HIDDEN ABBOTT RABID SUPPORTERS waiting to be unleashed... AUSTRALIA and SYDNEY DESERVE BETTER newspapers THAN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD and that horribly rancid Daily Telegraph. In what cardboard box has the SMH editorial team been living for the last nine months?

 

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM

 

The Sydney Morning Herald has been fooled again...

 

It did not challenge John Howard's war on Iraq and accepted that the United nations had authorised the war which the UN had not. This lack of "authorisation" was the reason why only the US, the UK and Australia were the only countries involved — illegally — against Saddam. 

 

We never saw a proper "legal" advice given to John Howard either, despite him promising to do so. He called his advice a "sound legal basis" which is very different from a proper legal document which Howard, like Blair could not get without fudging.

 

Howard, Blair, Bush should be in prison. Abbott should be interned in a loony bin for committing troops in Syria without any legal basis either. Turnbull should also be committed for continuing this charade.

 

At least the SMH has recognised it was fooled by Abbott but it cannot see the same crap is coming back at us because the vacuum salesman has changed. Idiots !

Journalists at Fairfax Media have condemned proposed $30m job cuts and strongly rejected a “mission statement” in which the company stated an ideological position about being pro-business and pro market-based solutions.

“We reject any ideological direction,” a stop-work resolution on Thursday said. “We report the facts fairly and accurately without fear or favour. We call out the company’s pernicious ideological interference and the fact that coercion was buried in their mission statement.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/06/fairfax-journalists-condem...

 

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