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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.
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.
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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.
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