Medicare Black?
Phil Glendenning from ANTaR makes a telling and terrifying point about the most shameful health problem in Australia:
It’s tragic that Labor’s health centrepiece, Medicare Gold, is targeted to a group, the over-75s, which effectively does not exist among indigenous people, because their life expectancy is 20 years lower than other Australians. Fewer than 25 per cent of Aboriginal men are likely to live to 65, compared with 87 per cent of other Australians. These figures are worse than just about every country in the world, including Nigeria and Bangladesh. For the same reason, few indigenous people get superannuation and the age pension.
If you were Aboriginal you’d be forgiven for thinking you were being discriminated against. And maybe not for the first time!
October 8th, 2004 at 1:35 pm
Ross Gittins made a similar point that age testing is just wrong, and I’m inclined to agree.
October 8th, 2004 at 4:15 pm
Matt! I just discovered your blog. How bizarre. Welcome to the blogsphere. While you are here, would you mind looking at your RSS feed? My aggregator (Newsgator) doesn’t like it.
http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmattrubinstein.com%2Fwp-rss.php has a hint at a possible problem?
Cheers,
Mark
October 9th, 2004 at 1:39 pm
Hey Mark—how’s things? I’ve fixed up the news feed so that it passes your validator now, but I notice in the forums that some people are complaining about Newsgator and WordPress generally so I don’t know if it’s going to work. Let me know.
October 10th, 2004 at 2:05 am
Hmmm, thanks for trying, but still no go. I’ll see if newsgator know whats up (I don’t think I’m running quite the latest version either).