- The Guardian
- Issue #2194
Have you been to an Emergency Department lately? Whatever the reason for going is, it’s an alarming experience. Someone close to this paper took a 99-year-old relative to an ED and couldn’t find a seat. Most people know someone who’s had to wait for more than five hours. A side effect of that is that if you do get seen quickly, that’s terrifying because it means you’ve got something seriously wrong with you. If you’ve ever needed the services of an ambulance, you may have been involved in ‘ramping’ – you’re in the ambulance, but there’s no room in the hospital, so you wait and wait in the vehicle.
This is healthcare in Australia under normal conditions. Now imagine Emergency Departments and ambulance services if there’s a crisis on. The crisis could be another pandemic. It could be a climate change-caused disease, like Dengue fever (predicted to move south as average temperatures rise). The next crisis could also be war-related – if there’s a war and we have serious casualties, the medical system is going to have to change drastically. Even if there’s a war and no Australians are injured, there will be shortages, as anyone who buys petrol or diesel knows right now. This country imports 90% of its medications (see ‘US Pharmaceuticals vs PBS,’ page 5). Emergency Departments show a system under severe strain that will not handle the next crisis.
Emergency Departments and ambulances don’t exist in isolation. People go to EDs not only because of sudden emergencies, but also because it’s the only way to get treatment they can’t afford elsewhere. People go because the clinics they’d rather go to aren’t properly resourced. People also go because elective surgery waiting lists mean that a lot of patients develop complications and need emergency treatment. ‘Elective’ sounds like it’s optional, but elective surgery is surgery which is not immediately life-threatening, but needed. Going without it can mean you don’t get to walk, or work. While waiting, people live in pain and sometimes develop life-threatening problems.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Australia could take the heat off Emergency by fully funding a public health system. If all health care was bulk billed and easily available, it would make a huge difference to the over-stressed emergency departments. We can afford this. We can also afford to put dental care in Medicare and make that bulk-billed too (bad dental care leads to a lot of other health problems). This country can afford to properly fund elective surgery, so that people don’t need emergency treatment while they’re waiting, sometimes for years.
Doing these things would cost money, but the system as it is now costs everyone. If there’s another crisis, it’ll cost us much more in money and lives lost. This country can afford to have a fully funded high-quality medical system, free at the point of delivery. Just cancelling AUKUS and finding a rational alternative would more than pay for it. Once we had a properly functioning medical system, Australia could stop funding the private healthcare system, which would unleash billions.
What stands in the way of Australians not waiting for almost a full day in Emergency, or waiting for years for elective surgery isn’t a shortage of money. It’s a political system that puts the interests of big business first. The Communist Party of Australia is working for a country that is run by the people of this nation in the interests of those people. If that’s what you’d like, consider joining or supporting the CPA.
