Health Care & Aged Care Our illustrious Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is trying to sell the nation on the idea that we have to have a co-pay for visiting a doctor, or that the payments to doctors for short appointments needs to be reduced, because somewhere in the world today a child may be born who will live to 150 years of age. Of course, if he can't afford health care because, after he's paid his Medicare levy etc. he can't afford the co-pay, or doctors no longer bulk-bill so they can make up the shortfall imposed by government, he won't live so long and certainly not well. Hockey also relates the story of only having to pay $40 for the treatment of his son's broken foot. He says that was "inherently wrong", because he could afford to have paid more. No, Joe, that doesn't make it wrong. You - and the rest of us - pay the Medicare levy so that we can access health care. That's what it's for. We may need to raise the levy. The levy may only be raising half the annual cost. But there are other initiatives that can be taken and that would make sense to improve health care delivery and maintain access for everyone. You only need to read a newspaper to find out about them, or talk to actual health care professionals. It might mean more money spent now and less - significantly less - later, but it puts the program on a progressive track, taking advantage of new technologies, new techniques, new and better practices. But that's not what this government wants to do. At best their ideological commitment to "small government", something they never fail to fail to achieve, demonstrates a complete misapprehension that government is the one organisation that can apply the leverage needed to make things better. At worst it's simply that they hate Medicare. They hate the very idea of someone else getting something they think they're not getting - even when they are. Good Catholic boys who heard "the poor you will have with you always" and learned the wrong lesson from the story, they've somehow adopted the mindset that being poor or ill is a moral failing. Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, our current and former health ministers, they are lying. Medicare is not "unsustainable", and we do not need to inflict "price signals" on health care.

American Novel I've heard it's been said that all of jazz is either a 12-bar blues or "I Got Rhythm", so maybe all of great American novels are either The Great Gatsby or ? Well, Donna Tartt's novel, The Goldfinch, I think, is Gatsby. It's a very entertaining novel, certainly, although the object referenced in the title is little more than a MacGuffin, one of the secondary characters is a highly improbable Russian, while the rest are nearly little more than backdrops, but all that's never mind. The story roughly parallels the vague backstory of Jay Gatsby, with the great love lost, the rise to a position in which to reclaim it, but then takes a different turn, with a redemption Gatsby never finds, but not the final resolution. The protagonist is agonizing at times and the prose let's him linger on his agonizing nearly beyond endurance, but you finish with a sense of how realistic that is and how the past drives his present. I haven't read any of Tartt's other novels, and I don't know that I'll go so far as to seek them out, but I'll be very interested in her next, I think, and can recommend this one.