fatvegan

In his little editorial today on what is wrong with (can you guess) Kevin Rudd, he spends most of his time talking about how bad the public health system is. This is the same public health system that Tony Abbott, as Health Minister, presumably takes some responsibility for. He is basically saying "Politicians are incompetent. I can't run these blasted hospitals and none of the other guys can either, so please fire us."

Abbott wears his free market crush on his sleave. Rich people will do a much better job of allocating scarce health resources than the government. It would certainly be an interesting experiment to find out if we could recreate the fantabulous bargain that is the US health care system¹. But as Abbott wisely says "Hospitals are too important to experiment with."

1. US spends 15% of GDP on health - more than anyone. They rank about 40th in the world for life expectancy and infant mortality - worse than anyone with two coins to rub together. Go privatization! Go the mind-blowing economies of scale from 300 million health consumers all in the one spot!