Australia Diabetes Project Dropped
A $200 million program in Australia designed to prevent diabetes was dropped by the federal government. This was done in spite of this disease costing the country billions of dollars each year. The article is located here and I just love the way they use the term “scheme”. The program was one that worked on lifestyle modification programs for people in their 40s whose doctors felt were at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
It was a six-week course on changing their diets and activity levels. It failed because only about 3000 people had taken part since it began in 2008 and not the tens of thousands had been expected to. The feeling down there is that the federal government should have looked at barriers in the national program and removed them instead of scrapping the whole thing. Interestingly enough, another project was dropped this year. It was a $436 million plan for better co-ordination of care for people with diabetes. So what is going on there? It seems to me that they feel that you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Patients need to be ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS in their own health. Without that you are just throwing money away.
Wish somebody would explain to those yahoos over here who want to do P4P and penalize us when somebody won’t act responsibly to take care of their own selves.
I wouldn’t be bothered by their use of their word “scheme,” which in the Australian vernacular is a synonym for “program” (or “programme.”) What’s reassuring, however, is the poll at the end of the article which, at the time I saw it, showed that readers were heavily in favor of reinstating the scheme.