Health Care "Reform": Population Control for Australians?

This article first appeared in the Aug/Sept 2009 New Citizen

Under accelerating conditions of economic collapse and the spread of old and new pandemic diseases, the proposed health care 'reforms' mooted by Kevin Rudd's on March 3rd, will result in untold rates of mass death in Australia.

Despite the fact that within his announcement not one extra dollar has been provided for an already funding starved health sector, until 2014 (!), Rudd intends to reorganise Australia's public health system upon the same "casemix" system that Jeff Kennett used to gut Victoria's system in the 1990s. To ensure that the murderous Kennett-style casemix would be the basis of his federal takeover of hospitals, he appointed the architect of Kennett's Victorian health care reforms, Professor Stephen Duckett, to his Commission.

Rudd's "reforms" have little to do with Australia per se. They have been dictated by the same British imperial financial interests who have notoriously destroyed Britain's national health care system-in which patients are routinely denied care as a matter of official policy-and are trying to do the same to the U.S., through British stooge Obama's present drive for Hitler-modeled "reforms" there. Aside from looting the population along the way, the chief purpose of these reforms is to kill people, as per Prince Philip's repeatedly stated desire that the world population must be cut from its present 6.7 billion, down to two billion or less.

Kennett's carnage

The single greatest cause of the present, unprecedented crisis in Australia's health care system, has been its systematic, chronic underfunding over the past two decades, exacerbated by economic rationalist demands that health care be "profit-making". This has now resulted in the unnecessary death of an estimated 6,000 people per year, even by understated official estimates, as undermanned, overworked and harried staff try to assist patients crowded on trolleys in hallways, in packed emergency rooms, and on ambulances on perpetual bypass. The precedent for such underfunding as a matter of policy, was set by Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett's brutal cuts to health care from 1992-99, "reforms" dictated by the British Crown's Mont Pelerin Society.

As documented in the May 1996 issue of the New Citizen, the Mont Pelerin gang installed Kennett in office in 1992, armed with a reform plan written by two of its local arms: the Macquarie Bank-funded Tasman Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs. Ominously titled "Project Victoria", it targeted every sector of the Victorian government for downsizing, outsourcing, amalgamation and privatisation.

Kennett set a target of a ten per cent cut in Victoria's public health budget in two years, which was achieved through the implementation of Professor Stephen Duckett's casemix hospital funding system in 1993.

Casemix was ostensibly designed to achieve "efficiency"; under the system, patients were classified into diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), and hospitals received a fixed level of funding for each type of diagnosis.

Patients who took longer to recover, such as the elderly and the frail and those with post-operative complications, didn't attract as much funding as other DRGs, which led to hospitals discharging patients in the low-funded DRGs early, restricting the number of patients in the low-funded DRGs, and competing for patients in the DRGs which received higher funding.

Hospitals in rural communities with a disproportionate number of elderly and chronically-ill patients, saw their budgets slashed; the Moe hospital was forced to close in 1995, after losing $12 million, or 25 per cent of its annual budget, under casemix funding.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 12,000 jobs—including 2,000 hospital nurses—were cut from Victoria's health and community services sector between February 1992 and February 1994.

In 1995, Kennett replaced the individual boards of management which operated Victoria's public hospitals, with commercially-oriented boards of professional directors which ran hospital networks with a business orientation; Macquarie Bank's Graeme Samuel got the plum job of running the Inner and Eastern Health Care Network.

The result of Kennett's reforms was chaos: one study, by the Royal District Nursing Service, showed that in the wake of casemix funding, more public hospital patients were being readmitted because they were discharged too early, which the RDNS blamed on the pressure to comply with casemix weightings, or to make beds available for patients banked up on trolleys in emergency departments.

Insanely, under the sponsorship of the Commonwealth Casemix Development Program, most other states followed Victoria's lead, and imposed the casemix funding system.

Now, purportedly in order to solve the resulting crisis in state public hospitals caused by casemix, Rudd intends to take them under federal control, and impose more casemix.

Behavioural economics

Rudd's NHHC is targeting a 0.2 per cent of GDP saving in national health and residential aged care expenditure, by 2032-33. As in the British system—or in Obama's plans—the elderly are targeted. For example, Recommendation 42 of the report demands aged care funding be reduced by sharply raising the age qualification in the funding formula from over 70 years of age, to over 85, and then only funding actual users, instead of the current system of funding capacity (places per 1000).

The similarity between Rudd's targeting of the elderly, and Obama's targeting of the elderly in the U.S., is not a coincidence.

On 31st July, Rudd's Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, the man charged with cutting the budget deficit, dedicated a column in The Australian newspaper to an enthusiastic endorsement of behavioural economics, the fascist population-control methods practised by Obama's economics advisers whose origins reach back to the British East India Company "economists" Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. They taught that man is merely an animal, motivated by seeking pleasure ("utility") and avoiding pain, and Bentham's "utilitarianism" gave birth to the "marginal utility", or "cost-benefit" analysis of today's behaviourists, in which pleasure has been retitled "benefit", and pain, "cost". The behaviorists, of course, define what is a "benefit". Then all health care, as in the present British system, for instance, becomes merely a statistical model, with such equations as, "Is it 'beneficial' to 'society', to save the life of an elderly patient, if it will 'cost', say, $2000 a year?" Or, might it not be more "beneficial" to free up that $2,000 to bail out Wall St., the City of London, or even Australia's own bankrupt "Big Four", slashing population levels along the way? Obama, for instance, has forked over $26 trillion in "bail-out" funds to Wall St. and London, even as he demands that $1 trillion be cut from U.S. health-care costs, to allegedly "keep down the budget deficit".

And these health care "reforms", in Britain, in the U.S., in Australia, and elsewhere, are being rammed through even as medical experts warn that the present, relatively mild but highly-infectious form of the swine flu, could well give way to the sort of highly-infectious, but deadly virus as the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50-100 million of what was then a much smaller world population.