Australia is the greatest place on earth because...

Personally haven't had a problem with the public health system WHEN IT CAME TO THE CRUNCH. They really looked after my Dad late last year when his heart gave up on him, he had to wait in the A&E ward overnight while a bed opened up in a ward, but they really looked after him the whole time.
 
Yeah I've had two broke bones which needed operating on and it didn't cost me a jot. I'm happy with that side of things, though the elective surgery waiting lists can be rather large. Plus it's just criminal that dental work isn't covered by Medicare.

Melbourne's transport is good when it works and if you stick to the timetable, but it can be frustrating. I went for a run and had dinner with friends a few weeks ago, rocked up at Southern Cross and had to wait 26 minutes for a train. I bought a scooter a few days later.

Public transport in Kuala Lumpur is way ahead of ours. Monorail is the way to go.
 
For all the moaning I do about London, I have to admit the public transport system is decent (except for the trains which tend to crumble if it snows :)). Buses every few minutes (depending on time of day and route of course); I have written a number of shitty emails to one of our bus companies before, but that's usually because they don't know how to manage two specific routes. And yes, I love writing shitty emails :)
 
TROOPER MICK said:
having spent 9 months in intensive care with my youngest son without a doubt the best thing about living in Australia is the public health system, some people may argue that but the fact is if your in a life threatening situation there gonna come through and not slam you with a massive ass bill at the end of it
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Is it like Canada? by that I mean the health system.
 
I'm not sure what the Canadian system is like, but here in Australia we have social health care. It's not perfect and the previous PM wasn't a fan of it so he spent 11 years letting it erode, but I shudder to think what it would be like without it.
 
From what I understand about Canada's system, yes ours is similar, but as Gore said above it's not as good as it could be. It's still up there with the best in the world though, I believe. Canada's a bit wider reaching and better funded though, I think.

Here you want to go public for emergencies, and private for electives.

I had a mate whose wife was in a car accident and shattered both her knees. When the time came he asked the nurse if they wanted his private insurance details, and she told him no, as that would just mean the whole process would slow down. With public she got seen by doctor and given a room immediately. If they went private they'd have to wait for the paper work to got through, wait for an health fund approved doctor to come around and blah, blah, blah. All for the same treatment. So he let his cover drop because it was useless. A few years later he needed a hip replaced, and he waited forever for a slot in the public system.
 
The health system in most states is good.

NSW and QLD are just utterly fucked now. It's going to take a lot of work to fix them now because they've let the existing infrastructure fall well below the Healthcare facility guidelines. Basically, everything they renovate is going to cost them 3 to 4 times more than it should. It's going to be cheaper to knock down exisiting hospitals and build new ones, which they can't afford to do either.

I'm pretty glad I'm in the ACT.
 
phlogiston said:
Here you want to go public for emergencies, and private for electives.

I had a mate whose wife was in a car accident and shattered both her knees. When the time came he asked the nurse if they wanted his private insurance details, and she told him no, as that would just mean the whole process would slow down. With public she got seen by doctor and given a room immediately. If they went private they'd have to wait for the paper work to got through, wait for an health fund approved doctor to come around and blah, blah, blah. All for the same treatment. So he let his cover drop because it was useless. A few years later he needed a hip replaced, and he waited forever for a slot in the public system.
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By health fund approved doctor, I assume that you mean a consultant orthopeadic surgeon. Any Dr who has completed their fellowship year to the Royal Collage of Surgeons is a health fund approved provider. That is what they spend 7 years training for. Yes by going private you would have to wait for the process to begin, however the process should not take more that 30 minutes to an hour. It just just a matter of a phonecall to the persons private health insurance provider to establish what the relevant coverage is for the policy holder.

Once that is established, the hospital will contact the Consultant surgeon for the day, they will be either treated at the hospital they are in, or transfered to a private hospital for treatment to begin. In most cases this will be done at the existing public hospital so as the patient can recieve fast and appropriate care. should there be the need for surgical intervention, the procedure will be done by the consultant, where by as a public patient the procedure will be done by a registrar (a junior Dr that is midway through his training period). Often this is done in the after hours period when the consultant has gone home and the nursing staff is reduced.

The consultant surgeon is then responsable for all follow up care. This way there is continuity of care. As a public patient you may have Dr A doing the procedure, Dr B overseeing the relitive physiotherapy and Dr C responsable for post op care and complications. Should you require a post operative appointment 6 months down the track, there is a huge likelyhood that the registrars have moved on to another hospital under the direction of a different consultant. The problem with this is reliance on detailed and accurate notes taken at both the time of initial injury and during the recovery period.

As for the nursing staff not wanting the details of your friends private insurance, sounds to me like they couldnt be bothered filling in the paperwork.
 
As happy as I am to be in a country with a social health care system, I still think the NHS is fucked considering how much I pay out each month (my National Insurance is over £150 a month, and considering I'm in a private pension scheme that doesn't include the national pension contribution I'd be making otherwise); if I were to call today for a doctor's appointment (you can't just see any doctor), I'd have to wait over a week unless I wanted to hang around all day and get an emergency one.

Maybe things have changed in Australia in the last 8 years since I've been gone, but I liked being able to just go to a doctor, and wait perhaps an hour for someone to see me if I had a throat infection of whatever. Is that a dream of times gone by? I know you have to pay now and claim back from medicare later, unlike when I was there...

(One good thing about the NHS: prescriptions are £6 or so per item, regardless of what you need, so if you needed some expensive medicine or whatever, you don't need to pay out the nose for it)
 
Nah, around here where I am, I can still rock upto the doc's and wait an hour or two if needed, going to hospital emergency for a cold on the other hand, is fucked. And yes some people do go to hospital for minor things
 
Southy, you have to go to casualty here to get a Drs certificate for a cold.

Wait for a GP is like 3 days for a cold, and they won't back-date.
 
Here I go to a doctor at a public clinic and pay nothing. Sometimes I have to wait for a while, but it's worth it.

I never had to go to a doctor in the UK, but my mum says you have to register for one there and they won't let you go to a different one, which is just ridiculous.

On a similar note, when I went back to the UK and tried to reactivate my Lloyds account in London, they told me I had to go back to the branch I opened it in. As luck would have it, I was heading up to Yorkshire anyway, but it's another ridiculous example of rigidity.
 
Shannow said:
Southy, you have to go to casualty here to get a Drs certificate for a cold.

Wait for a GP is like 3 days for a cold, and they won't back-date.
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Yep... outside the cities, the amount of doctors who bulk-bill are so small that they're booked out for days on end. I wasn't used to that when I first moved into the mountains. I got sick so I went to the doctor and the receptionist said, "Do you have an appointment?". Um, no. "Can you come back next week?" "But I'm sick now." "Sorry, you need an appointment." The next place I went to wanted to charge me $65 up front, for a two-minute consult so I could get a doctor's certificate. Bleh to that. GPs up here are only good if you have a pre-existing condition or if you ring them when they first open and squeeze in because someone else has died or something. Believe me, I'd rather go see my GP than sit in casualty for three hours with a kid who just has the sniffles, but that's how it is here.
 
Mark said:
I know you have to pay now and claim back from medicare later, unlike when I was there...
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I don't really go to the doctor because I don't like it, but the few times I have had to go get a medical certificate or whatever, I've never had to pay anything. I just give them my Medicare number. Last time was only last year... And as far as I'm aware I don't pay anything at all to even cover that (apart from my taxes obviously contributing to Medicare, but even then every year when I fill in my tax return and get to the Medicare section I end up getting money back from it in my return).
 
I suspect registration is partly due to Primary Care Trusts that run each boroughs health budgets, and partly to try and deter 'health tourism', which is a huge problem here. All in all, our health care system is superb. Unfortunately it just can't cope with the numbers of people using it. While people who are in employment are paying their dues into the system, the millions who are not paying national insurance are making no contribution at all and are often the people who will use it the most. Personally I have no problem paying a tenner if it means I get seen by the GP of my choice when I need to see them, and not two weeks from now. Our PCT is actually not too bad; I've been referred to specialists a few times and from GP to hospital it's been about 12 weeks. For a 'free' service I don't think that's too bad.

I have a massive chip on my shoulder about our benefits culture in the UK. It was set up to help people out in times of trouble and help them get back on their feet. It's become a way of life. My parents have worked since they were 14 years of age, full time. When my father was made redundant, he was given Job Seekers allowance for 12 months. As my mum had a job, it was up to her to support him and the rest of the family after that. Yet on our small estate there were two families of career benefits scroungers, with parents that have never worked. That's not an exaggeration either. My father did get another job, because he has a work ethic and he wanted one, but he's since medically retired due to terminal cancer. You'd think after paying into the system for 40 years and working his arse off that he'd be able to count on being looked after for his last few years. Naaaaaaaah. My parents struggle for every penny they have coming into their home, they have had to fight like fuck to get what little allowances they do get, and Mark spends every weekend writing complaint letters to various people for my mother because people keep trying to screw them over. In the meantime, my brothers ex-whore and her tribe of illegitimate kids live off of my fucking money. The people in this country have become scum, and I ashamed to be part of it.
 
We are headed/already there in alot of suburbs here in Brisbane, and I have always been very very vocal about the lazy jobless fucking scum, we work hard for them to drink their way into oblivion everyday and end up in hospital instead of dead where they would be better off, because in the meantime they are jsut to fucking lazy to bother getting a job.

And moreso they are the people happy to whine about every thing they don't fucking have, when getitng stuck in and working hard would achieve every goal they have ever had in the meaningless 'gimme gimme' attitude to fucking life

Rant Out
 
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