Private health insurer reports that private hospital surgery includes very complex and costly cases

More than half of the surgery done in Australia is paid for by private health insurance and yet this is still a "drain" on government hospitals? Leftist logic at work again, it seems

High-end surgery in private hospitals, costing health funds $100,000-plus per case, is on the rise, fuelling concerns that it is adding to, not reducing, the strain on public hospitals. Australia's biggest health fund, Medibank Private, which has paid a record $364,859 for a bowel operation, says complex and costly operations, once the preserve of big public hospitals, are being performed increasingly in private hospitals. "Traditionally the high-end surgeries would be borne by the public system. Now we are seeing people electing to use their private health insurance for these types of procedures and enjoying the clear benefits it brings," a Medibank spokesman, Craig Bosworth, said yesterday.

But the drift of advanced cases to private hospitals is disturbing public hospitals because it adding to the difficulties they already face in finding and retaining surgeons and nursing staff. The executive director of the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, Prue Power, said there was "great concern" in public hospitals about the trend to private surgery and the demand it generated for scarce medical staff. Staff shortages in public hospitals made it even more difficult to deal with waiting lists and delays in getting treatment in public hospitals, she said

Ms Power called on the Federal Government to rethink the $3.6 billion health insurance rebate and the level of premium increases for health insurance. The rebate was introduced by the Howard government, which forecast that it, along with other incentives, would boost memberships, keep premiums down and, through increased use of private hospitals, relieve pressure on public hospitals. Private hospitals do more than half the surgery performed in Australia, a plus for those with private hospital insurance, who account for less than 45 per cent of the population.

Health funds, already facing heavy increases in costs, have lodged with the Federal Health Department their applications for what are likely to be significant rises in premiums to take effect from April. Ageing of the population and increasing health-care bills and use of insurance cover by members are driving up costs well ahead of general inflation, the regulator, the Private Health Insurance Administration Council, has stated.

Ms Power said each time premiums rose, so did the cost of the rebate to the taxpayer. The growth in expensive private hospital surgery raised "a basic question of equity". "Funding going to the private sector will just exacerbate the workforce shortages in the public sector." Ms Power said she was not against growth in the private sector but it was a matter of getting the public-private balance right [Who says what is right?] and of getting better integration between the two sectors.

Mr Bosworth said that the rising number of high-cost claims paid by Medibank indicated the private health sector "is increasingly carrying the burden of an ageing population and the complex technologically intensive hospital care older people often require". The overall number of very high-cost claims had leapt in the past year, with Medibank covering 149 claims costing more than $100,000 - a rise of 73 per cent. Among the high-cost operations Medibank paid for in NSW was a neuro-surgery case costing $276,595, neonatal surgery and lengthy post-operative care for a newborn child costing $256,452, and arm nerve surgery on a 24-year-old patient costing $164,134. Mr Bosworth said many of the top claims were for people aged 54 and over, showing that private health insurance was not just for "elective surgery lumps and bumps".

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Monarchists back 'people's choice' in any republic

The politicians won't like this. They do now have the right to appoint the governor. A republic might cause them to lose that right

The Rudd Government's "softly softly" approach to making Australia a republic will face a major barrier unless it allows for an elected head of state, according to new polling which shows that even monarchists overwhelmingly prefer an elected president rather than one appointed by Parliament. A survey of 2000 voters by pollster UMR Research last month found that 50 per cent supported Australia becoming a republic while 28 per cent opposed such a move and the rest were undecided, consistent with poll findings over several years. But when the entire sample of voters was asked whether the president of an Australian republic should be elected by the people or appointed by the legislature, 80 per cent opted for the direct election model. Only 12 per cent said they would support an appointed president.

By asking both republicans and monarchists for their views on the model for a republic, the survey effectively replicates the two-stage plebiscite the Labor Government plans on the issue. Under this approach, which the Government has signalled it may pursue if it is elected to a second term, the first stage would be a national vote on whether to become a republic. If this favoured a republic, a second plebiscite would then be held on the model for a republic. The main issues in this second stage would be the powers of a new head of state to replace the Queen and how the person to fill that role should be chosen.

The UMR survey, which covered a statistically representative national sample of voters, suggests that republicans would win the first stage and that, in the second stage, support for an elected president would grow to overwhelming levels as monarchists joined republicans in backing the direct election model.

Previous polling on models for selecting a head of state has only asked pro-republic voters for their opinions, showing strong majorities in favour of a directly elected president. The significance of the UMR findings is that it suggests that the third of voters who would vote against a republic in a first plebiscite would then switch behind the direct-election model in any second plebiscite. UMR is federal Labor's pollster but its research on the republic was carried out as part of its general market and political research.

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Fake teacher? No problem in Victoria

Your legion of highly-paid bureaucrats will protect you (NOT). And when you do get found out only a slap on the wrist awaits you

THE state education watchdog has been rapped over the knuckles for failing to uncover a fake teacher working at a Melbourne primary school. The Victorian Institute of Teaching registered Renai Brochard, despite conflicting birth dates and signatures on her paperwork. Brochard, 41, was given a suspended jail term for stealing the identity of South Australian teacher Ginetta Rossi, her husband's former wife. She used the name to gain registration in Victoria and taught for several months last year at Melbourne Montessori School's Caulfield campus.

Brochard was exposed only after Ms Rossi tried to renew her teaching status with SA education authorities. It is believed Brochard is now working in a childcare job in Adelaide.

A recent institute of teaching disciplinary hearing heard Brochard was paid an annual salary of $58,828 at Melbourne Montessori. She misspelt Ms Rossi's first name on some registration documents and had whited out her name and replaced it with Ms Rossi's on her birth certificate, the hearing was told.

The Montessori principal approved Brochard's birth and marriage certificates, although not authorised to do so, the institute panel found. In its decision, the panel, headed by Susan Halliday, said thorough scrutiny and cross-referencing of all paperwork by the institute would have revealed the discrepancies. The panel said the institute had tightened checking procedures, but it recommended staff receive more training. The fraud was the first case of its kind to go before an institute of teaching hearing.

Brochard was convicted at Moorabbin Magistrates' Court on April 17 on charges of deception and making a false document. She was given a three-month jail sentence, suspended for 12 months.

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Some Australian wisdom of the year 2008

This was one of those years. Relieved only by the appearance in the West of an apparent (secular) messiah by the name of Barack Obama. Once again, the past 12 months have been marked by a sense of irrationality in the air along with gross hyperbole and false prophesy aplenty on the ground.

January: The Sunday Age predicts former Labor leader Kim Beazley will be appointed governor-general and declares: "We say, arise, your excellency, your people await." It will be a long wait, since Quentin Bryce took up the gig in September. Meanwhile, from the United States, Australian journalist Tony Walker describes the decision of Hillary Clinton's advisers to ask her campaign workers to sign confidentiality agreements as "a bit Stalinist". Walker seems unaware that the communist dictator Joseph Stalin did not bother with election campaigns.

February: Phillip Adams reports rumours that John Howard is to be awarded the Order of the Garter by the Queen. He wasn't. Writing in Dear Mr Rudd, artistic director Juliana Engberg proposes that if the Prime Minister "really wanted to muck with their heads, Rudd could get Callum Morton to redesign his entire office and turn it into an architectural conundrum, so that when people walk in they find themselves in an entirely different kind of environmental-hotel corridor, lift lobby, West Wing". He didn't.

March: Psephologist Malcolm Mackerras prophesies "Hillary Clinton will be inaugurated as president of the United States". Academic Peter Manning depicts the media in Australia as a "state media" - presumably of the kind that prevails in authoritarian regimes. British journalist Max Hastings alleges that "Australian politics is chronically corrupt". Former Brit Keith Austin sees footage of Australians protesting against the construction of a mosque in Camden and maintains that such "hate . could have been ripped straight out of 1930s Germany".

April Fool's Day: Christian Kerr declares that (then) Opposition leader Brendan Nelson's listening tour "is rather like making a confession to some extent at a Chinese show trial during the Cultural Revolution". In Mao's Cultural Revolution, millions of Chinese were killed. Julian Burnside, QC, later in the month decrees "it is a relief to know that ideas and conversation are once again permissible in this country". Yet he managed to become a living national treasure during the time of the Howard Terror.

May: On the ABC's Unleashed website, Bob Ellis proclaims his "hate" for Hillary Clinton and theorises that she does not engage in a certain sex act. However, your man Ellis concedes that his hate-filled thoughts of Clinton's (alleged) "towering frigidity" are affected by the impact of "some nights of the full moon". Fancy that. But Ellis got into the mood of the year by pontificating that Obama is "the present world's likely saviour". Thank God for that.

June: In the ACT, where there has not been a murder conviction for a decade, Justice Hilary Penfold sentences a defendant, who pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm by stabbing, to nine months' periodic detention. The learned judge advises the defendant he was fortunate that he did not kill the victim. So was the victim, when you think about it.

July: Piers Akerman writes that "Saddam Hussein destroyed the marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates . and the ALP may soon have to take ultimate responsibility for killing the Murray-Darling". Christopher Kremmer compares Rudd's condemnation of Bill Henson's photography of naked prepubescent children with "Afghanistan under the Taliban [where] images of the human form, even clothed, were banned". Which suggests that governments may change in Australia but exaggeration by moral equivalence continues apace.

August: Australian Olympic supremo John Coates volunteers the observation that Britain has "very few swimming pools and not much soap". Children's author Mem Fox condemns placing young children in long-day care as "child abuse". She announces that such offspring do not want their parents. A Canberra man who the Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court, Terence Higgins, found not guilty of murdering his mother because he did not have the requisite intention - despite stabbing her 57 times - is freed after serving 22 months in custody.

September: Age columnist-cum-shouter Catherine Deveny mocks the US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin as "the closest thing Republican strategists could find to man without a vagina". Novelist Kathy Lette links the experience of Western women who camp to "fleeing the Taliban over the Afghanistan mountains". She lives in London. The Canberra Times reports that nine personality types of heavy drinkers have been identified but misses an obvious category. Namely, the thirsty.

October: Former Queensland premier Wayne Goss observes on ABC Radio National that "people don't eat at home any more". ABC1 Media Watch presenter Jonathan Holmes repeats his view that the action of Australian police in trawling "through people's phone records and homes in pursuit of leakers [of official documents] smacks of Stasiland". The brutal East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, spied on virtually all citizens of the communist state. If Holmes believes Australia today is even remotely like the one-time East German dictatorship, he does not know much about either society.

November: Kerry-Anne Walsh claims that Rupert Murdoch's Fox News "only talks to conservatives". She must have missed Bill O'Reilly's interview with Obama. Walsh goes on to argue that "political amnesia is a wonderful thing". Sure is. The fashion-challenged Germaine Greer bags gorgeous Michelle Obama as having worn a "butcher's apron" to her husband's victory speech.

December: Deborah Cameron, the ABC's leading eco-catastrophist, warns that there "could be an ice-free Arctic in 2010". Including during the winter months, apparently. Speaking as a parent, author Sue Cato pronounces that "your children, no matter how gifted and talented, will disappoint you". The year ends with playwright Harold Pinter engaging in one final (life-ending) pause.

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