Thanks to generous support for our crowd-funding #HealthMatters campaign – see our Honour Roll below – Croakey will be providing extensive reporting on Labor’s national health policy summit at Parliament House in Canberra on Friday.
We will be live-tweeting through the day – using Labor’s #alphealthsummit and our #HealthMatters hashtags, will do Twitter Periscope interviews with key speakers and participants and will post a big wrap of the day’s discussions and responses on Saturday.
The summit will open with a welcome from Shadow Minister for Health and Medicare Catherine King and keynote speech by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.
The opening and closing sessions will be live streamed by Labor on the Facebook pages of Shorten and King, whose office says that interviews and vox pops will also be uploaded through the day.
Labor says the summit will bring together around 150 of Australia’s “leading thinkers on health in an open and transparent discussion on the future of our health care system, as the next step in preparations for a Labor Government”.
Our aim at Croakey is to put prevention, public health and equity at the heart of our coverage of the summit, looking both at what’s on the agenda and what’s not.
The Australian Council of Social Service provided a good opener for those discussions, releasing its 2017-18 Budget submission this week that has a broad focus on health equity and the social determinants of health.
Among many other priorities, it calls on the Federal Government to remove the Medicare Levy surcharge exemption for those holding private health insurance, to drop the Private Health Insurance rebate and invest more instead in preventive health services, and to introduce a sugar tax and changes to alcohol taxes.
It also highlights the chronic under-investment in mental and dental health – not just by the current Coalition – saying these areas “have been neglected for decades and impact most strongly people on the lowest incomes”.
For more background on the summit, see our earlier story on why we launched the crowdfunding campaign and King’s early invitation for health policy people to participate in Labor’s process.
Crowdfunding our cover
Croakey is very grateful to the 20 supporters who backed our #HealthMatters fundraising campaign so we can report in detail on the summit.
Here’s our #HealthMatters Honour Roll (some contributors have asked to remain anonymous).
Elissa Campbell
Sandy O’Sullivan
Leelee Cordova
Julie Leask
Gemma Crawford
Summer May Finlay
Colin Cowell
Yvonne Luxford
Megan Williams
Penelope joy
Ernesto Quijada
Melissa Jardine
Daniel James
We thank them all for their generous support, of the campaign and of Croakey.
How you can be involved
If you’re at the summit, we’d love it if you tweet from the sessions you’re at because we will only be able to get to two of the eight roundtable sessions.
Please join in on Twitter also if you’re not there but following the conversation, to let us know what you’re thinking on the issues that have or haven’t been raised.
And please tweet us questions you’d like us to put to chairs or Labor luminaries that we are able to interview.
Don’t forget to use the hashtags.
Lots to talk about – but sugar tax ,increasing Medicare levy on those with incomes above 180K, adressing the ‘gap between GP and Specialist renumeration and increasing transparency of medicare payments to all Docs( put it up on the web as in the USA – aftre all its our money – taxes ) . Hospitals and Specialists to report publically their clinical outcomes.
Recognise carers as an integral part of the health workforce and acknowledge patient choice at every level of decision making. Finally stop the love affair with fossil fuels – they kill people and the planet – now that would make a difference