As we head into the final week of the election campaign, the bombardment of political advertising, policy announcements and media releases amps up to another level. Sorting through the hype to determine the post-election reality can be difficult in such a crowded information environment. Luckily there are a number of stakeholder groups and interested health consumers who have done the hard work of scrutinising the messages, identifying the gaps and analysing the impact various policies will have on specific sections of the community. Croakey has been particularly interested in the insights from the following groups:/sources
The National Rural Health Alliance has released its Election Scorecard – it provides a detailed analysis of each of the three major parties’ commitments in a range of areas affecting the health of rural Australians. It’s worth a look just to see how different the NRHA’s approach to health policy is compared with some more narrowly-focussed groups (hint: it’s not all about hospital beds and doctor numbers!).
The Consumers Health Forum’s Our Health Our Community has some interesting suggestions from consumers for issues that our politicians should be focusing on – superannuation for carers is one of them.
The Australian Healthcare Reform Alliance has released a serious of media statements commenting on the health policies of the major parties and identifying the gaps, in particular the failure of either major party to include a focus on the social determinants of health and health equity.
In The Conversation, Professor John Dwyer argues that neither Labor nor the Coalition have a plan to address the major problems in our health system and outlines a vision for the health system we could have by 2023 if we started working on some of the underlying structural problems now.
Disclosure: Jennifer Doggett has provided consultancy services to both CHF and AHCRA
