USING MEDICAL SERVICES: SPECIALISTS AND MEDICARE
Medical Specialists
Medical specialists are a close knit group of doctors who have banded together to obviate the laws of supply and demand. Specialist colleges have gained control of the post graduate medical education process. Doctors are not allowed to enter the specialist ranks until a vacancy exists by death or attrition. Some say that medical specialists have devised a system that allows them to make exact clones of themselves. Certainly no Aborigines have risen to the dizzy heights of medical specialization and both women and members of the working class are woefully under represented. One female medical luminary was recently heard to say that only seven per cent of the seven major specialist colleges was made up of women members. Medical specialists have also taken over much of the procedural work once performed by general practitioners. It is ironic to think that only this extraordinarily skilled and highly motivated group of self interested medical professionals stands between the people of this country and the Eastern Europeanization of Australia's private health sector.
Medicare
As a continuum of structural reforms and changes begun after the Second World War, the edifice of Australia's national compulsory health insurance scheme owes as much to the Australian Liberal party as it does to the Australian Labor party which claims most of the credit for its creation. Medicare provides excellent cover for people choosing to visit general practitioners or medical specialists in the private sector but it has failed dismally to meet the challenge of universal hospital insurance. 80 per cent of all doctors charges in this country are now bulk billed and this means most people never have to pay any cash at the point of delivery of medical services. Detractors of Medicare claim that medical costs have risen 30 per cent since the schemes introduction in 1983. However, at least 30 per cent of the population could not afford direct access to the health care system before Medicare as it now stands was finally brought into existence. Over the last decade Medicare has managed to restrain spending in the health care sector at roughly seven or eight per cent of Gross Domestic Product. This is more than the five per cent spent by Great Britain and a lot less than the 14 per cent spent by the United States, with at least 20 per cent of their population without any medical insurance at all.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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