Joshi

I'm sending a collection of these to my wife. Any good boob shaped ones?

My bad, fixed

As a sequel to his cowardly failure to condemn genocide Albo now supports the unilateral escalation against Iran

To be clear most professors are senior in their field and usually indicates research as well as teaching, I was in a cantankerous mood this morning. But regardless Medicare needs to take access to specialist treatment seriously.

Nationalise the mines and be done with it

Yes, obviously medicare would need to increase the rebate and private insurance fees would necessarily increase(as they would now be actually paying for care rather than acting a a gatekeeping mechanism)

Rebate for a short consult with a specialist is $81.55, a long consult is $236.65.

The title professor indicates that they hold a teaching position and says nothing about their clinical skill. Plenty of specialists take the piss and leverage the title to charge ridiculous fees.

In my experience as a GP a reasonable standard fee for a specialist is around $300 with $80 back from Medicare. So yes the Medicare rebate would need to increase substantially but I doubt more than we will save when AUKUS falls through. It is within the capacity of a government with the right priorities. Also increasing the availability of public specialists would be a good companion policy.

IMO there needs to be some regulation around this, a simple measure would be to tie Medicare payments to a pricing structure(eg. a specialist can only charge the Medicare rebate + 20%).

If a specialist wants to charge more then that's fine but the patient(or insurance) will have to pay the full cost

Exactly, it's counter-productive to blame individuals for doing the best they know how in a broken system.

Has anyone ever suggested engaging Chinese companies to help develop Aussie high speed rail. Seems like an obvious option.

I understand there'd be some dog whistling around it but surely there's no actual sovereign threat if we develop local maintenance capacity.

Escalating conflict with someone with delusions of persecution is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Not knowing the system in the UK means I can't give very good specific advice. You may be able to contact a local mental health network and there is a good chance they will know him. Let them know what is going on in as much detail as possible and suggest that he is increasingly agitated and alienating himself from the community. It sounds like this gentleman needs a conpulsory treatment order or whatever the UK equivalent is.

It's kind of like providing a highly expensive, and logistically complex service requiring recruitment and retention of highly skilled professionals to provide an essential service to people who can't possibly pay for it is not suited to privatization.

20/20 hindsight I guess :/

Like every new technology that is hailed as changing everything it is settling into a small handful of niches.

I use a service called Consensus which will unearth relevant academic papers to a specific clinical question, in the past this could be incredibly time consuming.

I also sometimes use a service called Heidi that uses voice recognition to document patient encounters, its quite good for a specific type of visit that suits a rigid template but 90% of my consults i have no idea why they are coming in and for those i find it not much better than writing notes myself.

Obviously for creative work it is near useless.