Health — a universal right
By Pip Hinman
I was struck by a series of letters in the Sydney Morning Herald recently about the virtues or otherwise of sending new mothers home immediately after giving birth. Why should they be taking up valuable bed space when they're not actually sick, one writer asserted.
While several respondents pointed out the obvious, it is true that if you've ever been forced to wait in an emergency room for what seems like a lifetime, in your anxiety and distress you can wonder if some patients are outstaying their welcome.
For years, there was widespread acceptance in Australia that free or minimal cost quality public health care was a basic democratic right. But there are now signs of people being worn down by the ideological campaign against the notion of health care being a "right" and who, instead of standing up for our collective rights, are seeking to blame others "less deserving" of public health care.
This shift in consciousness was made possible by a similar ideological campaign, led by the former Labor federal government, which imposed the user-pays approach to public education, child-care and other essential services.
Labor politicians cynically believed that for so long as Medicare and the dole were left relatively untouched, public resistance to user pays would be minimal.
Under the Coalition, user-pays is being applied more vigorously to health. State governments are being starved of desperately needed funds to keep public hospitals functioning.
Howard slashed $800 million from the public hospital system, axed the Commonwealth Dental Health Program (leaving people waiting for up to five years for care) and cut the pharmaceutical benefit scheme.
According to some commentators, the money currently being thrown at private health insurance companies would be ample to provide 10 or so major public hospitals and eliminate existing waiting lists.
We're told that Howard's changes are inevitable because of "changing demographics" — the population is ageing and therefore costing more in health terms — and the increased costs associated with new technologies. The health budget has "blown out", we're told, and we need to find "new" ways of managing the burgeoning costs.
Enter Howard's "politics of envy". Governments calculate, callously, that if they can dupe enough people into believing that some people are getting more than they deserve from the public purse, they can deflect public anger and anxiety away from the real robbery, such as the huge subsidies to private health insurance companies and Howard's planned $10 billion-a-year tax cut for big business.
So far, Howard hasn't been able to touch Medicare, but Pauline Hanson's demand that Medicare be reserved for use by the very poor only is the logical extension of the government's two-tier health system.
We must resist these attempts to destroy health care as a right. We must reject the very logic of user-pays and build a broad, campaigning opposition to the privatisation of health and other public services.
Everyone is as deserving as the next of quality, affordable health care, just as they are of dental care and a range of paramedical and preventative health services.
If Cuba, a tiny, impoverished country with an economy badly affected by a 40-year long economic blockade by the United States, can provide one doctor for every 176 inhabitants (the highest ratio in the world), has a life expectancy of more than 75 years, and has an infant mortality rate (7.2 per 1000 live births in the first year of life) rivalling that of the US, why can't we in a rich country like Australia?
[Pip Hinman is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]