Private hospitals extolled

Health Minister Tony Abbott seems to want Australian public hospitals to either contract out their management, or at least to adopt management practices more in step with private hospitals.

Speaking at a seminar of state opposition leaders at the weekend, Mr Abbott said he had “rarely spoken to a doctor or nurse with current personal experience of public and private hospitals who didn’t prefer the private system”.

One can certainly understand why many health professionals would rather work in a smoothly-run, profit-oriented environment – i.e., a business – where such things as ‘casualty’ and emergency departments do not exist.

Well, obviously (hello, Tony!) this points to a fundamental difference between public and private hospitals. Public hospitals have a social welfare function, with which private hospitals clearly are not significantly hampered.

Private hospitals are, virtually by definition, profit-making enterprises. Theoretically one may bleed to death in the carpark unless one has private health insurance. To point all this out is, of course, to labour the bleeding obvious.

Okay, to be fair Mr Abbott was only trying to flag, albeit in his idiosyncratic boofhead style, the fact that the crisis in public hospitals points to a need to study alternative management models for these institutions. “Those running public hospitals,” he said, “ought to consider how they can learn from the private sector and the extent to which the need for government to pay for public hospital services really makes it necessary for bureaucrats to run them too.”

Well and good, but the fact remains that bureaucrats who run public hospitals operate under a significantly different set of priorities and obligations than do bureaucrats who run private ones. Please do give it a little more thought, Mr Abbott.