Jannetta's Blog

The Australian government leaves car insurance up to individual states. At least in Victoria, where I grew up and owned cars, there was one compulsory insurance scheme that went along with one scheme for dealing with the results of traffic accidents, in terms of people needing money for medical care, etc. It wasn't brilliant, but it wasn't bad and it beats the h%^&* out of everyone having to sue everyone (unless you were a lawyer living off that, as my father once appears to have been). New Zealand has a similar scheme for tour operators, actually.

But Health Care in Australia went from being allegedly universal to being some giant rort where the government expects you to pay for private health insurance unless you are very poor, and then compensates you for it. If you don't pay, instead they make added barriers for it to become more difficult. Meanwhile, having given the handful of people who are making big profits in health insurance companies a really solid taxpayer-supported icome, guess what happened to the money that was used to fund the state health system? Well, it is still there, and in the free market you are welcome to try and extract it out of the health insurance companies at the same rate as before. If you expect them not to pay shareholders, to be run by people making public service salaries not the ludicrous fat-cat excesses that are now all the rage in Australia, ...