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A little birdy told me (a reliable birdy) that hospitals spending cash like it was monopoly money during COVID is a big part of the reason they are having to make hard cuts now.
Honestly seems like there was a lot of overreacting during COVID. And the fact that no state government wants to review their actions suggests to me they know this and don't want to be held to account.
Money was spent cause it had to be. Everyone was working with limited information which in hindsight looks like an overreaction.
Doesn't help that we've got massive infrastructure projects going over budget and money is tight in the state.
This would be a perfect time to raise revenue by taxing resources and such,.and sharing it with the states.
Anyway, just my two cents
Well, my source works in the medical system according to them there was insufficient spending restraint, even with COVID.
More broadly I think we overreacted. This is an opinion, and the one way to flush out the facts is to do something like a royal commission as state level. Of course state governments won't do this because they don't want to be accountable.
And regarding hindsight, there was plenty of people at the time who considered it as such but they were ignored. Do not think for a minute that all decisions are rational and forward thinking. There was a lot of politics at play here.
I don't think it was so much an overreaction to Covid or excessive spending, I think it was more a case of not spending in the right way, so most of what was spent was wasted.
The whole point of lockdowns was to slow the spread to allow medical services time to increase the capacity to deal with a higher volume of patients, but that didn't really happen. If they had spent their money on things that would increase capacity, streamline process etc. it would have led to the ability to clear a lot of backlog of patients, reduce ramping etc. when that capacity was not needed for Covid. That obviously hasn't happened.
I don't work in the hospitals but I expect the experience there was similar to my organisation - the potential problems were ignored early on when it would have been the best time to do something, then when Covid hit a lot of money got splashed around on short-term initiatives so managers could feel they were doing something (thanks for the free food, but really a waste of money), but no effective longer term changes were met. This is combined with workers leaving because of overwork and insufficient staff numbers and pay making it hard to recruit and retain new people, which is the culmination of years/decades of insufficient funding.
Having gone through a few royal comissions at work I can quite confidently say it won't do anything. A few executives get tossed out, some minor cosmetic changes get made and the staff all get new uniforms with the new logo on it. All of the real systemic and funding problems that are the root cause remain.
I agree with you there was misdirected spending but there was also overreaction.
To be clear, I'm not anti all restrictions but if you clamp down too hard people will more likely try and break the rules for their own sanity, which leads to more spread and so on it goes.
Reasonable restrictions which people can more sensibly manage I think would have led to better compliance overall.
And to put it bluntly, people die and you cannot avoid all death. And obviously people who are sick and/or old are more likely to go down that road whether it's from COVID or even just the flu. At some point you have to accept that a virus cannot be stopped, and have a serious conversation about what you are willing to sacrifice in the future for the present.
We are now seeing writ large in the form of high interest rates and extreme stress on the health system among other things the consequences of these decisions. You might have saved someone back then, but unfortunately someone will die today from deferred surgery, being stuck in the ER or worse waiting for an ambulance.
Oh look, I understand that health spending was mad at the time for many reasons.
I also think that in such a unique case of a global pandemic, overreacting is better than a relaxed approach.
The data from places with minimal restrictions is pretty telling.
I imagine that anyone in a position of authority would have done similar given the situation.
I don't agree it's unique. We've been down this country road with the Spanish Flu, SARs and many others.
The correct approach is neither overly reactive or overly relaxed. In the first few months I am sympathetic to strict controls while information was gathered, but beyond that it was clear this was not the black plague. And I don't agree everyone in authority would have copied Victoria's way of doing it throughout the pandemic.
Take Sweden for example. Sweden's approach while not flawless (particularly in relation to aged care), overall had the best trade off between restrictions and allowing free movement. Furthermore their excess death rate was amongst the lowest in Europe.
You must understand that all that the excessive money spent then purportedly saving lives will cost lives in the present through delayed surgery, excessive wait times in ER (we are talking 48 hrs plus here), and ambulance ramping and wait times. And we are not just talking about hospital spending here but also all kinds of other spending that went on during those two years. Has anyone sat down and had a hard look at the books and looked at everything spent? I can guarantee you there would have been some absolutely mind boggling stupid things.
One example is the 100 million spent on air purifiers in schools with all most no evidence they would have made a material difference, and certainly no review has taken place afterwards. 100 million. Let that sink in. That could be spent on hospitals now.
There's no free lunch here. Someone will have to pay eventually and not just in dollars but also in lives.