Brickbat: Still Waiting

Many Australians are waiting years to see public medical specialists. In some cases, the wait stretches more than six years for a neurologist or over three and a half years for urgent neurosurgery. Doctors warn these delays are causing "irreversible complications" and even life-threatening conditions. Under the taxpayer-funded Medicare system, patients can see public specialists at little or no cost with a referral from a general practitioner. Yet demand far exceeds capacity. Health authorities insist they are adding more specialists and improving referrals, but shortages persist, especially in the most understaffed specialties.

Comments

[AT]

Health authorities insist they are adding more specialists and improving referrals,

Lie.

Tell them how the capacity is limited on purpose. Which is what allows it to be "taxpayer-funded" at "little or no cost."

Public healthcare is designed - designed - to kill people.

[SQRLSY]

I don't know how bad xenophobia is in Australia, butt here in the USA, part of the design for having the health care system fall short is to accuse all imported foreign doctors of being "rapefugees" (Thanks for less than NOTHING, Scumby etc.!), and keeping them OUT! Shit is FAR better that people DIE, according to Scumby and other xenophobes, than for patients to have to deal with slight accents and "wrong" skin colors! Then of course there is ALSO onerous credentialing and licensing and other inflexible red tape...

And don't forget cheap plastic flutes!!!

Butt don’t you see, SOME professions NEED to be SUPER-highly educated to that they can PROTECT us benighted peons! Think of super-highly edumacated DOCTORS of Expert Medical Doctorology, who protect us from the use of not-properly-authorized DANGEROUS medical implements of mass death and destruction, such ass cheap plastic flutes, AKA, the dreaded, complex and dangerous LUNG FLUTE!!!

To find precise details on what NOT to do, to avoid the flute police, please see http://www.churchofsqrls.com/DONT_DO_THIS/ … This has been a pubic service, courtesy of the Church of SQRLS!

[Vernon Depner]

A single-payer health care system can't function without strong, independent death panels. Making tough decisions about who gets treated and who doesn't is the only way to control costs in a public system.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Health authorities insist they are adding more specialists...

I'm told there's a rich vein of doctors and engineers to be mined from abroad. Some racists choose to hold out instead for Dr. Skynet to graduate from medical school, I guess.