TJ Ryan Foundation Board member and Research Associate, Linda Shields, writes about the threat posed to Medicare’s future by the ‘privatisation by stealth’ and ‘death by a thousand cuts’ imposed by government on the public health system.
‘Medicare is under threat. Its decline is being enabled by stealth. By not paying costs that match inflation, by making it impossible for skillful health practitioners to be able to keep their skills up to date and innovative, and by expecting the patients to pick up the slack, Medicare is slowly drifting away. Increasingly, patients will have no choice but to use the public hospitals, putting more and more pressure on an already overburdened system. We will all lose out.’
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