Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.
A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.
As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.
The real problem is the choke hold the doctors’ lobby has on the numbers of specialists.
As a contrast, Australia has 1440 specialists per million people while Greece has 2700 per million. No other profession in Australia is insulated from competition as much as doctors.
I bet you if you told any doctor in Europe they could earn 1/5th of what the doctors here are earning they’d fall over themselves to come to Australia.
We’re importing low wage workers like they’re going out of fashion let’s open the floodgates in Universities and hospitals and create and import specialists instead with the same tempo.
There’s something obscenely wrong here when we talk about costs of healthcare and no political party raises the central issue.
In the end it’s an education problem:
The easier solution is training your own doctors - there are numerous studies that it is possible to increase student numbers in medschools if far more government support would be provided. Make medschool cheaper and easier to join, set up corresponding specialist training based on the need of the population and offer huge incentives (up to “free medschool rides”) for the ones that sign a contract to work in a bulk billing capacity for X years in a needy region after they finish training. Maybe even attach visa offers to this.
That takes time,but it is far more helpful and sustainable in the long term.
You’re potentially wrong, let me explain why.
When the US did that, there was a massive backlash.
Becauae the people who use medicine the most are old, and the instant they saw brown doctors they wouldn’t stop ranting, demanded a different doctor, we’re sure the doctor was poisoning them or otherwise couldn’t understand English, etc.
If they have to choose between long wait times and brown doctors I don’t know how Australia would decide.
It was a boomer trope for a decade, and not even slightly subtle in its racism.
On the whole, they’re used to East Asian health professionals, and some even deliberately seek East Asian doctors.
They do NOT like South East Asian HCWs, but will tolerate it. There are regular requests in community groups for an ‘Australian’ doctor, and whilst there is plenty of pushback from commenters about what makes a doctor Australian, they tend to say they have issues with the accent (not overly unwarranted, I have an Australian accent but can speak fast, and this is probably the most common feedback I get).
There are a bigoted few who will actually refuse to see Aboriginal clinicians.
I doubt it would be a problem for Australia where 30% of the population is foreign born.
Also, having been to a hospital a few times during the last year for friends and relatives I’m pretty sure more than 60% of doctors were not white.
And either way, even if a small portion of the population would choose to avoid the imported specialists, their mere presence in the marketplace and being used by the vast number of people that don’t care would lower the prices for everyone.
But then a lack of healthcare would be self-inflicted and deserved and the racist mysogenist bigots could die with a societal clear conscience.