THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Billions fail to help government health system

Billions fail to help government health system

In Queensland as in the U.K.

A leaked memo written by Queensland Health's chief has revealed the Beattie Government has failed to substantially reduce surgical waiting lists despite an unprecedented funding boost and the Premier's claims to have turned the corner on health. The memo, by Director-General Uschi Schreiber, also warns that the integrity of Queensland Health's budget is at risk because little attention is being paid to how the billions of dollars the Government has promised to fix the sector's problems is spent. The two-page document's message is in stark contrast to the glossy brochure on health - titled "Keeping our promise" - mailed out to every Queensland household at a cost of more than $300,000.

A letter from Peter Beattie accompanying the brochure promised the funding would lead to "more hospital beds, shorter waiting times and better health care". But on surgery waiting lists, Ms Schreiber's memo states: "Despite the additional funds in 2005-06, to date, the available data indicates no substantial improvement. This is disappointing. "The effective management of elective surgery is crucial because the public health system's performance is constantly being assessed by the community by reference to this area of service delivery."

Ms Schreiber has summoned top bureaucrats to a strategy forum next week, asking them to justify their existing programs and rein in spending as "there is no further additional funding available" for the 2006-07 financial year. In the June 9 memo, leaked to The Courier-Mail yesterday, Ms Schreiber expresses frustration that a core function of Queensland Health, elective surgery, is still lagging. "It has become apparent that the recent substantial increases in funding to the Queensland public health system has led to a lack of attention to maintaining budget integrity, to the detriment of current and future service sustainability. I am also concerned that the large increases in funding have not been translated into improvements in performance, particularly in relation to elective surgery."

In a further leaked memo dated June 28, Ms Schreiber warns that the growth in employment [As in Britain, the money has gone on bureaucrats] in Queensland Health had increased "beyond the targeted levels". "Our current projections indicate this level of increase in staff may not be sustainable within our current budget allocation," wrote Ms Schreiber, who was appointed to the top job a year ago after the sacking of Dr Steve Buckland.

Ms Schreiber said yesterday she had a mandate to look after health as well as taxpayers' funds and to remind doctors, nurses and administrators that there was not a bottomless well of money. "This is about ensuring that we don't go over budget," she said. "If I'm not careful in managing the place, it will flip the other way where people think there is no reason to keep looking at budget integrity. "We are doing more surgery than the Queensland Health system has ever done in its history. It indicates ever-increasing demand. We have to find a whole lot of new reforms for elective surgery."

The Schreiber warnings come as Mr Beattie reassures Queenslanders in an expensive advertising campaign that the biggest ever reforms to the health system are paying off. An extra $9.7 billion over five years has been pledged by Mr Beattie for "more doctors, nurses and allied health professionals, more hospital beds, shorter waiting times and better health care".

Health Minister Stephen Robertson and Mr Beattie yesterday defended the cost to taxpayers of the advertising blitz. "It's really important that we produce a report card which highlights exactly where the reforms are being done. Queenslanders are entitled to know how the system is improving," Mr Beattie said. But Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg accused Mr Beattie of "spending $8 million on propaganda trying to convince Queenslanders they have turned the corner". "Despite all the glossy taxpayer-funded advertising and the self-congratulatory claims that they have turned the corner on health, the reality is that under Labor the waiting lists have grown by a further 13 per cent under the Beattie Labor Government," Mr Springborg said. "This is devastating news for those people forced to wait to get the health care they need."

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Billions fail to help government health system

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive