Abbott cut health funding - a lie explained
Just about every single Labor supporter takes the time to quote back that Abbott cut health spending.
Well here is a left wing paper who love Labor but seemingly do not like the lies as taken the time and explained the whole thing - it is long and will not all fit on one page.
So I will post the bits that count and anyone can then go to the source and read the whole lot - which is still a bit biased toward Labor - ha ha ha.
Well papers do take sides and not many on the side of the Coalition or Liberal Party.
[quote]After suffering in the polls over the home insulation fiasco, the Federal Government hopes to regain ground with its ambitious policy to reform the financing of public hospitals.
Rudd’s reform plan is a genuine effort to resolve the long-standing problems with the dual federal and state government responsibilities for funding public hospitals.
But from the point of view of a government facing re-election this year it also has the political benefit of shifting the political focus to an issue where the electorate traditionally has more faith in Labor than in the Coalition.
To hammer that political message home, the government is intent on portraying Abbott’s personal record as Health Minister under the former Howard Government in a negative light.
So what is the truth of the government’s ‘‘billion dollar ripoff’’ charge against the Opposition leader.
It turns out to be one of those political attack lines which so crudely simplifies reality as to be misleading while stopping short of being an outright untruth.
The charge is over the level of public hospital funding under the Howard Government’s last set of Australian Health Care Agreements with the State and Territory governments.
Those agreements set out the amount of funds Canberra would grant to the States and Territories for their public hospitals for the five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08.
Labor’s accusation is that as Health Minister Abbott cut these funds by a billion dollars. But there are several problems with the charge.
Problem number one:[b][color=red] Abbott wasn’t Health Minister when this funding deal was done.[/color][/b]
The Health Care Agreements were put on the table for the States in May 2003 when Victorian Liberal Senator Kay Patterson was the Coalition’s Health Minister. After significant argy bargy over the proposal – including a famous meeting where the Premiers walked out on John Howard – the States and Territories signed up to the Agreements between August and September 2003.
Howard appointed Abbott as Health Minister in October 2003.
So if the Health Care Agreements did indeed rip a billion dollars out of public hospitals, Abbott was not as directly and personally responsible as the Health Minister as Labor suggests. However he certainly was responsible as a senior member of the Howard Government and as the Health Minister who presided over the implementation of the five-year funding deals.
But here we come to problem number two:
those Howard Government Health Care Agreements actually increased federal public hospital funding from $7.1 billion in 2002-03 to $9.8 billion in 2007-08.
Labor portrays this $2.7 billion increase in funding as a $1 billion ‘‘rip-off’’ because the increase was not as large as Treasury and the Finance Department had originally expected.
Every year Treasury compiles a Budget which estimates government revenues and expenses for the next four years.
Back in 2002, Treasury’s forward estimates had put federal public hospital funding for the four years from 2003-04 to 2006-07 at $33.5 billion.
When the Howard Government finalised the Health Care Agreements, the actual funding for those four years turned out to be $32.6 billion.
[b][color=green]That $900 million reduction in the actual funding as compared to the original forward estimates is the source of Labor’s billion dollar rip-off figure.
So Labor’s claim that Abbott ripped a billion dollars out of health funding is only true in the sense that if your boss intimates that he will give you a $3,000 salary increase next year, but then only gives you a $2,900 increase, he has ripped you off by $100.[/color][/b][/quote]
[url=http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/contributors/abbotts-billion-dollar-ripoff-the-truth-on-health-funding-20100316-qaq1.html]It-is-a-Lie-that-Abbott-ripped-a-billion-off-health-funding[/url]
Desperate men and now a desperate act - brutal removal of serving Prime Minister Rudd who was the saviour of the Labour Party in 2007 when he won.
Lets us wait and see if the lie is repeated again and again as Labor politicians seem to practise daily - how to bore the pants of the electorate by boring repeating of the same old over and over and over and over.
Someone's telling porkies
In 2003 $108 million was cut from public hospitals.
In 2004 Mr Abbott cut $172 million.
In 2005 he cut $264 million.
In 2006 he cut a further $372 million and more in 2007 his final year as Health Minister.
That's more than a billion dollars cut from hospitals in just 5 years.
http://www.abbottfacts.com.au/facts/out-touch-health-and-hospitals