(no subject)

[theducks]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/08/2210455.htm?section=wa?section=wa :

A health economist has calculated that the government should be willing to spend $15 billion a year to bridge the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Curtin University's Gavin Mooney has estimated the government should spend $340 billion over 22 years, based on the government's spending elsewhere in the health service.[...] He has calculated that the government spends $40,000 per person subsidising a drug that increases life expectancy by one year.

You know, I think if you just paid matching salary to each of Australia's 400,000 Aboriginals of up to $40,000 per year, you'd actually do a lot better job of increasing life expectancy than medicating them. Money for nothing is a recipe for trouble, but doubling income gained from other sources could produce some exciting results, especially if some of that money went into local community trust funds for housing and the like.

Comments

[nephron.livejournal.com]

No, there really aren't many Aboriginal people who aren't disadvantaged* in the health care system. If you are Aboriginal, you can count on getting not only poor care in a systemic sense, but poor, rude and oblivious care from the individual health care workers.

ETA: * to be more clear, the vast, vast majority of Aboriginal people are disadvantaged in the health care system, whether they are dark or pale, remote or urban, poor or wealthy and educated or not.

[greyreviews.livejournal.com]

Aren't you an individual health care worker?

[nephron.livejournal.com]

Yes. And while I try not to provide poor or rude care, I am painfully aware that I'm pretty oblivious to a lot of the cultural differences and difficulties.

Others that I work with have more extreme views.

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

As I said, racism from health care workers isn't something that throwing more money in the system is going to help.

I am surprised if it is really that significant... admitedly I do have very little experience with health care in general especially the treatment of various groups of people in terms of health care. However, I would be surprised to find that people involved in health care are more racist than the average population, which I don't see as being bad enough to really cause serious problems. I guess it could be a bit worse in rural areas but that comes down to either the cultural divide or rural health services being crap in general and needing improvement.

[nephron.livejournal.com]

No, you don't work in healthcare, and I suspect you don't talk to many Aboriginal people on a day-to-day basis.

You might feel differently if you were on the receiving end of the racism.

ETA: Not all extra healthcare funding has to be more hospitals for Aboriginal people or whatever- a significant part needs to be training Aboriginal people to provide healthcare within and outside the mainstream health care system.