2020 Health Overview (Doc Holliday)

Australians are living longer than ever before. In 2004-05, the average life expectancy (at birth) of Australian men and women were 79 and 83 years. This makes Australian among the longest lived people in the world. The cost of health care is, for the moment, quite modest by international standards.

Yet there is quite a clear agreement that Australia’s health care system is stuffed, that somehow it is failing to deliver the sort of results that we would like. We have too many fat kids, kids that don’t exercise enough, kids that eat too much, kids with bad teeth, kids that smoke too much, kids that drink too much, kids that pop too many pills. It was so much better in our days – when all we could eat were lard sandwiches, smoke cigarettes behind the shed, and play football barefoot on the street, while our mothers were in the kitchen quietly dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. But no, our kids are too soft and we know what’s best for them.

But don’t just pick on the littlies. Why not the oldies? They’re too demented to know what’s good for them. Why, if only they exercised more and ate properly, they wouldn’t fall over and hurt themselves or clog up our hospitals with renal dialysis.

Then you’ve got the old (ho-hum) rugby scrum between the stern-looking guys in white coats and the witch-doctors promoting alternative therapies: ‘You can’t trust them holistic types, there’s no science in them’. And finally, there’s always that big bogey-man everyone loves to hate: big fat rich corporations (health insurance, pharmaceutical and, wait for it, oil companies) and professional associations (greedy doctors and dentists) all seeking for ways to rip you off.

There is one personality type that permeates the baying crowd: the one who knows the Truth. In his view all Australians should hike before breakfast, ride a bike to work, eat sushi for lunch, and have a cup of green tea after work. This one wants to ‘educate’ you, regulate you, provide you with all the infrastructure and incentives you would need, and then tax you to finance it all.

There is no doubt that Australia’s health-care industry can be improved. The problems almost always arise from the strange horse-trading that masquerades as government policy. There is, for a start, a rather odd relationship between Medicare and private health insurance (PHI): why should anyone take out PHI if Medicare is available for free? But Medicare is a major of problems because taxpayers are shielded from the effects that their lifestyle behaviours have upon the cost of the system. Fixing health insurance should be our first priority.