Publication: The Australian
Date: 13 November 2010
Section: Health and Science
OPINION: Jeremy Sammut
Article excerpt:
TONY Blair has belled the cat on the unsustainable fiction of a free and universal health system. In his autobiography, the former British prime minister says what no serving politician could and survive electorally.
He writes that as technology advances and people live longer, there's no way the healthcare systems of developed nations can survive at a reasonable cost with a minimum level of equity in provision without putting individual responsibility and public health policy at the centre of the debate.
Decades of government-run, taxpayer-funded health care have created a pernicious sense of entitlement among voters that defies economic reality. This makes genuine health reform notoriously difficult to achieve despite the financial and other problems confronting health systems such as Australia's Medicare.
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