Page 2661 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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Mr Duby: They have axed the hospice.
MR HUMPHRIES: In many important respects, on the fringes of this plan there are important changes which detract from the quality of the system we are going to get, and I will come to those in a moment. The difference is mainly in the area of private health care. Some 150 beds are to be cut out of the system that the Alliance Government would have created by the year 2000. Under our plans, which were clearly tabled and were on the public record for some months, there would have been 1,300 beds in the public and private systems combined by the year 2000. We acknowledge that there is considerable pressure on the public hospital system in the ACT, and the only way of relieving that is by creating some alternative place where people with private health insurance can go for medical care. That, unfortunately, is to be undone by this Government.
Under the Berry plan there will be only 1,150 beds by the year 2000, give or take a few. Cutting 150 beds out of the hospital system, public or private, will put pressure on the public hospital system. It must do so. If it does not do so, if it does not increase the waiting lists in our public hospitals, for example, some extraordinary magic will have been worked. The fact of life is that if people cannot use private hospitals they will have to go to public hospitals. If you are sick you have to go somewhere.
On my calculations, at the present time in the ACT there are approximately 120 private beds at John James Hospital and something like 58 to 60 at Calvary Hospital. Those figures may be slightly out of date, but they are basically correct. That is a total of about 180 beds in the ACT. With the closure of Calvary private, which we would have to have if we expanded to 300 beds and which Mr Berry has announced the Government intends to do to provide the 1,000 hospital beds he has promised us, and with the scrapping of the private hospital project we had announced, that 180 private beds in the ACT will actually drop to 150 beds, assuming that John James is allowed to expand from its present 120 to 150.
What this Government is doing is closing private hospital beds in the ACT. Ms Follett shakes her head. You are closing private hospital beds. If you are going to close Calvary private and not replace it, you must necessarily lose private hospital beds. I would like to see Ms Follett explain to me how that is not the case. The fact of life is that there is a cut in private hospital beds whereas, under the Alliance Government there would have been a considerable expansion to allow people who wanted to take private hospital beds to do so.
If what Mr Berry said concerning the lack of demand for private hospital beds were true, we would not have seen over the last 12 months urgent and insistent applications by places such as John James for an expansion of their
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