Every time LibLab pollies in power scrimp by privatising essential public services like energy, banking, prisons, construction approvals, aged care – well a generation hence, the private oligarchy is found greedy, corrupt and wanting such that the public demands a royal commission.
In a callous attempt by pollies to cut funding on essential public service like aged care (what we pay our taxes for) so they can splurge on party preferred pet projects, the taxpayer funds that they reckon they will save, just come back to bite them when exposed to the social cost of those cuts, the subsequent royal commission costs and the costs of restoring the quality of public services that have been constitutionally entrusted to the polly bastards.
So PM Scott Morrison has today announced royal commission into aged care sector. Set to lose the next election, this time he hasn’t come kicking and screaming like public insistence for a royal commission into the banks – Scomo’s growth backing mates.
Remember Opal’s corporate aged care nursing home at Quakers Hill (Sydney) when in 2011 a Third World male nurse murdered 14 elderly by arson?
Remember Aveo’s corporatised retirement home provider based in Third World China exposed in July 2017 for rip off fees and complex contracts to dud elders?
Remember Oakden’s dementia acute care home in Adelaide exposed in February 2018 for a nursing culture of physical torture and drug overdosing of patients since 2001? South Australian Mental Health had outsourced staff to a 457 Third World agency to save costs, on the basis that the patients were waste citizens.
“He was dying anyway”
“As a community we expect high standards for the quality and safety of aged care services,” PM Morrison treckons. “The royal commission will be about proactively determining what we need to do in the future to ensure these expectations can be met.”
“I welcome an overdue look at the aged care sector in Australia,” Labor’s opposition leader Bill Shorten replies. “I said it was in national crisis some months ago … The government rushed out and accused me rather wrongly of causing fear-mongering. I wonder if the Minister for Aged Care will accuse his new boss of fear-mongering as he accused me.”
Aged Care Advocate Charli Darragh, whose mother Marie was killed by a lethal dose of insulin at a Ballina nursing home in 2014, has been fighting for CCTV and better staff-to-patient ratios for more than four years. She said she didn’t realise the extent of elder abuse until she was contacted by scores of people with tragic stories.
“It wasn’t until Mum’s murder that I discovered there’s no-one out there fighting for these buggers — no-one,” she said.
In 2016, ex-nurse Megan Haines was found guilty of killing Marie Darragh, 82, and Isabella Spencer, 77, at St Andrews Village nursing home.
Ms Darragh said while there were many “beautiful” nurses, carers and staff in nursing homes, there were also “evil angels” working in the sector.
“They don’t care,” she said. “I don’t even know why they’re in this industry.”
It’s not just aged care that’s been abandoned by government, neglected, privatised and outsourced to cheap and nasty Third Worlders. Health care has been increasing outsourced to private corporations that exist to profit. Cutting costs like reducing staff increases profit and shareholder returns. So nurse to patient ratios don’t exist – perhaps one registered nurse from the Third World to care for the entire home of 80 patients?
And the corporations get in cheap and nasty Third World witchdoctors. Hung Dien Phan (his real name) came to Australia as a refugee in 1979 after fleeing Vietnam with his family, obtained a degree in medicine from Monash University and then discovered how easy it can be to make serious money in this country.
As a GP locum in Melbourne, he earned almost $3 million between 2006 and 2013 in Medicare payments based on valid claims for patients he had seen. During the same period, he decided to top up his income by making additional claims for 14,565 services that he did not perform, using the names and Medicare details of patients he had seen previously. By the time the federal government caught up with him, he had raked in $854,188.20 in fraudulent claims.
The Victorian Supreme Court sentenced Phan to three years’ jail with a non-parole period of 16 months and issued an order for him to repay the money. The prosecution argued the sentence was inadequate and last year the Victorian Court of Appeal increased the term to four years, with a non-parole period of two years.
The federal government has caught a few other big-time scammers in recent years. Barbara Cindric was a dental receptionist in NSW when she submitted 300 false Medicare claims, 253 of which were paid, netting her $438,509.71. She was sentenced to 3½ years in jail, with a non-parole period of two years, and also will be required to repay the money.
It has become common practice at public hospitals to “privatise” public sector outpatient clinics staffed by hospital doctors with rights of private practice. Are these isolated cases? Perhaps only in the size of cases defined as fraud. Some exploitation is inevitable in a scheme that in 2015-16 paid out $21.4 billion in benefits for 389 million services. But the signs are that Medicare is wide open to abuse and the government may be doing no more than uncovering a small tip of a very large iceberg.
Signing over to a nursing home is a death sentence.
Nationalise Australian Health (including aged care)- away from corporate greed and the incompetent states!
Following British national standards