The squandered health dollars Sussan Ley ignores

Re-blogged with the kind permission of the author, Paul Smith, deputy editor, Australian Doctor

Hon Sussan Ley Health MinisterFederal Health Minister Sussan Ley offered another slick performance at her Press Club address in Canberra last week.

People like her, she has good telly presence in a way that happily contrasts with the bad cop menace of her predecessor Peter Dutton.

When she addressed the industry big wigs in the audience – the drug companies, the management consultancies, the medical groups, the private health insurers – you could see them undergo the beautific visions of those who feel goodness had returned to Narnia.

Ms Ley is lucky.

The politics of her job have an easy-to-follow script – lots of excited talk about the urgent need for change before unleashing the reform taskforce which makes the government look like it’s all action, while helpfully delaying the unpleasant stuff until beyond the next election.

Ms Ley added another review to those already running – to look at the private health insurance industry.

She sold it as an attempt to understand why, despite the $6 billion in public subsidy each year, so many policies are “junk”, failing to cover the hospitals interventions needed when their members are at their sickest.

She also gave a passing reference to freeing up health insurers to play a bigger part in funding care outside the hospital gates.

There was even mention of encouraging more people to save their own money to fund future costs of primary health care. These are the ideas often floated by those who see the concept of ‘Medicare for All’ as having a use-by-date.

The audience smiled sweetly back.

But there was one (brief) moment which offered a glimpse of the tougher times likely to come to the minister, especially when she eventually collides full-on with an angry AMA over her MBS reforms.

It was when the News Limited journalist Sue Dunlevy, someone rarely seduced by the breezy charm of politicians, got up from the press table to ask her a question.

“Every year health insurers are paying $180 million in natural therapies for which there is no evidence,” she said.

“You already have the review of the worth of those therapies conducted by the chief medical officer on your desk…”

“Can you tell us what that report said and what you are doing about it?”

The minister’s sentences broke like toasted waffle.

“…the issue of complementary therapies is an issue of great interest to Australian patients and certainly to private health insurers and those concerns about the budgetary implications of which you speak.

“But I don’t propose to take any piece in isolation out of the complex mix of interests, stakeholders (for want of a better word) and, of course patients and taxpayers, when we look at the important issue of private health insurance.

“To pick up one report commissioned by a previous government (not that necessarily has to be an issue in itself) and make it something that this government has to respond to almost at the micro level, without regard to the intersecting policies issues and interests, I don’t believe is sensible public policy.”

In desperation I put this in the Google language translator and my lap top’s coolers ran red hot with the futility of the task.

Work on the chief medical officer’s report began in 2013. It is in the minister’s locked draw, where it’s been since February.

It has remained there for a reason.

There is no justification for squandering taxpayers’ money on homeopathy, iridology and all the diverse species of woo when you’re preaching the necessity of making Medicare sustainable.

There is no justification when insurers themselves talk so piously about refusing to pay for poor quality medical care their members get from private hospitals.

The one explanation which dare not speak its name for why this money disappears down this rabbit hole is that the companies have to flog these extras to lure in the young and healthy, whom they need to keep the business afloat.

Not healthcare at all, just part of the marketing budget.

Ms Dunlevy’s question is important, not because pulling the plug on health insurance voodoo is going to save the health budget, but because it has the subtext: how serious is the government about this “waste” question?

Before the coming debate on rebates for cataract surgery or the spend on coronary stents or the cost consequences of a PSA test, before the hunt for all the low value rubbish on the MBS, the government is offered an uncontestable example of squandered health dollars.

And the response is to do nothing?

 

November Puzzles

04

The

NOVEMBER 2015 SKEPTICAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE

has ASTROLOGY as its theme

Click here for NOVEMBER 2015 LOGIC & MATHS PROBLEMS

with new PICTURE PUZZLES and MIXED BAG QUESTIONS at the top of the PUZZLES PAGE

Enjoy!

The Skeptic’s Guide to Tarot

This post revisits a post from 2010.
Our “Skeptics Guides” are also available in .pdf and can be downloaded from our USEFUL INFO page

The appeal of Tarot as a method of fortune telling seems inextricably linked to the exotic nature and large number of cards which make up the deck; they seem so ancient and unfamiliar to people used to the standard, modern, boring 53 card deck of four suits plus joker that their origins must surely be mystical. View More The Skeptic’s Guide to Tarot

Pointing the Bone at RMIT Osteopathy

RMIT osteopathy post graphic V2 1000Wby Mal Vickers

Readers of this blog will already know I’m somewhat skeptical of the claims made by the proponents of osteopathy. If you’re at all unsure about where osteopathy sits in relation to current science, I’d recommend reading my previous post on the topic.

RMIT University offers a degree course in osteopathy. I went along to RMIT’s Open Day to take a look at how osteopathy is promoted to prospective students looking for an interesting career in the health sector.

Osteopathy is a kind of quaint, old-fashioned, pre-scientific health care system. Practitioners generally offer forms of joint manipulation and massage in addition to the usual advice offered by many health practitioners – lifestyle, exercise and food. It can be quite hard to distinguish the treatments offered by osteopaths from those of chiropractors. The main difference between osteopathy and chiropractic is historical. The founder of osteopathy was Andrew Taylor Still (1928 – 1917). He appears to have worked by intuition alone and his pronouncements sounded plausible at the time. View More Pointing the Bone at RMIT Osteopathy

October Puzzles

03

The OCTOBER 2015 SKEPTICAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE
is all about PARANORMAL PASTIMES;

Click for
OCTOBER 2015 LOGIC & MATHS PROBLEMS:

and there are new PICTURE PUZZLES and MIXED BAG QUESTIONS at the top of the PUZZLES PAGE

Enjoy!

A Skeptic’s Guide to Homeopathy

March 2015 saw the release of the Australian Government’s National Health and Medical Research Council’s  Statement on Homeopathy. It concluded:  

“..that there is no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy is effective in treating health conditions.”

That’s as good a reason as any to revisit the following article, first seen here in 2010.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Homeopathy is an “alternative medicine” invented in the early 19th century by German doctor Samuel Hahnemann. Despite numerous experiments showing homeopathy to have no effect, it has become a multi-million dollar international industry with its own special rules in advertising law.

View More A Skeptic’s Guide to Homeopathy

Dr Ken Harvey on the Radio – Chiropractic Advertising

Dr Ken Harvey
Dr Ken Harvey

By Mal Vickers

Dr Ken Harvey, a friend of the Vic Skeptics was recently interviewed on ABC Radio National. (play the interview below)

The subject up for discussion was advertising by chiropractic businesses. The interview was prompted by an article Dr Ken Harvey recently authored for the MJA (Australian Medical Journal).

In the article, Ken expresses his concerns that not much has changed in the last five years since the regulator, AHPRA (incorporating the Chiropractic Board of Australia, CBA), issued a warning via a newsletter for chiropractors to clean up their advertising.

AHPRA stated:

The Board asks all chiropractors to review their advertising including their websites as a priority to ensure that the content meets the advertising requirements of the National Law and the provisions of the Guidelines on Advertising. There are criminal penalties for breaching section 133 of the National Law, which is set out in the attachment to this communiqué.

AHPRA newsletter, Aug. 2010

Since then, a CBA statement has also reminded chiropractors about their advertising obligations “in more than six publications in the past three years…View More Dr Ken Harvey on the Radio – Chiropractic Advertising

“Mixed Bag” Questions December 2015 – Answers

1. Moonstruck

2. Jimi Hendrix

3. Jim Henson

4. Tigris

5. Economics

6. He was president of the American Confederate States

7. True. There was a 17 month period between the 1932 and the 1934 ceremonies.

8. Lewis Carrol

9. Gymnastics

10. Snake

HARDER:

11. Walk in space

12. Paris

13. Champagne & peach juice

14. An (imaginary) talking mongoose

15. 7151

16. Zorro

17. Carmen

18. Pope Pius II

19. The Austrian Army accidently attacked itself (with 10,000 casualties)

20. Georgia

“Mixed Bag” Questions November 2015 – Answers

1. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker

2. parties, pastier, (piaster OR piastre), traipse

3. The Moon

4. Three times (spring, summer and autumn)

5. 1965

6. B. Its scales close

7. The Pope

8. C. Goodbye to meat

9. A shovel

10. Lord Of the Flies

HARDER:

11. 1838

12. Nepal

13. To avoid paying his mobile phone bill

14. He was dead when he crossed the finish line

15. Malacandra

16. Archie

17. Letters written by Prince Charles to UK Government ministers

18. Pope Francis’s Ford Focus

19. His cane (he was blind)

20. No “E”s