Aussies and Healthcare
This was an interesting piece describing a dilemma going on in Australia. They claim to get better value (no definition given) than us but they are trending in a scary direction:
- It’s Australia’s fastest-growing industry by employment, rivalled only by our burgeoning services sector and the mining industry. It’s the biggest single employer of Australians, with one in eight of us working in it. And it shows no signs of slowing down. Right now, nearly 1.4 million Australians work in the health and social care sector. On current rates of growth, before the decade is out, one in seven of us will be in the sector.
- This dovetails with the conclusion reached by the Grattan Institute, that it is more use of the health system, not an ageing population, that has driven the bulk of the rise in Australia’s healthcare expenditure, even though we’re getting much better value out of our health system than the Americans are.
I just want to point out how more and more Aussies are becoming government employees (through healthcare) and the rise in healthcare expenditure is getting worse and worse. This is a great example for us not to follow.
This reminds me so much of the time I first came to a middle size town in Iowa looking for a director’s position for the emergency department. There were four hospitals in a town that didn’t even have 125,00 population. This was the only industry in town besides farming. My remark then and still is, this is a dead and dying town that has no one else that is hiring. 25 year later it has gotten so much worse. The hospitals keep growing larger and larger and the industries besides them disappear. We now are a nation of dead and dying and the prolongation of the latter.