Paying for It The Liberals are abandoning their proposed $7 co-pay for doctor visits: good. It was a bad policy. The policy proposed adding this out-of-pocket tax to pay for a so-called “medical research future fund”, but the purpose was quite simply to drive people away from doctors, based on the claim that too many were going too often for too little. Are there people turning up at their bulk-billing physician’s office or clinic at the least sign of a sniffle or just because they’re lonely? Probably, but that doesn’t make Medicare “unsustainable”, as is so often claimed to be its status. In fact, Medicare is eminently sustainable, but health care itself does need work. I read a lot about various efforts being undertaken to improve health care delivery in the US and elsewhere. These may involve larger initial outlays, but the outcomes produced provide significant reductions in long-term costs well-beyond what’s spent at the beginning, and overall patient health is similarly improved. That’s big, as big, in its way, as antibiotics. It’s also smart, much smarter than driving people away from doctors or increasing the tax used to pay for health care. The supporters of the tax call it “structural reform”, but it isn’t a reform, unless you think abandoning universal health care is a reform, and it isn’t structural, as it doesn’t address health care itself. Pushing people away from health care is only going to make it more expensive as more people end up with worse health an earlier intervention could have prevented. Pushing health care into the private sector will not only increase costs, it will make it unavailable to the poor and burden the middle class, but that’s the idea, really. Liberals hate the poor. They regard poverty and illness as moral failings that should be punished. They despise the middle class for being aspirational and sucking up money that belongs to the wealthy. This is an ideological driver for the party and for the policies they seek to enact. That and the fact that Medicare was a successful Labor Party initiative for the last forty years, and nothing Labor has ever done can be tolerated. The Liberals have decided on a practice of extreme opposition, even in government, and this is one of the worst actions they’ve yet undertaken. Don’t count on the “co-pay” tax being gone forever. The Liberals are nothing if not persistent. Update: Absent the ability to put through their tax, the Liberals now propose to effectively stop paying doctors what they're owed for providing health care under Medicare. This is a despicable abrogation of their responsibility to the public and a slap in the face to doctors.