Riverina Health System In Ruins With No End In Sight

There is no point beating around the bush so I will call it as I see it. Michael McCormack and Daryl Maguire should hang their heads in shame for their lazy and lack lustre approach to securing palliative beds for Wagga Base Hospital.
Our public health facilities are being neglected in favour of the public/private partnerships that the conservatives currently favour. This is nothing more than penny pinching and shifting the responsibility of healthcare to the profit driven private sector. With our public system neglected for years and services run down to critical levels it is almost as if our politicians are trying to force people into the private system.
Why should taxpayers money be used to build facilities in a privately run business who operate to make a profit? How much public money will go towards the total development of up to eight beds and why is there only two beds available for public patients in a city of 60 000 people?
There is already contempt seething under the surface of our community for the Riverina Cancer Care Centre debarkle. Riverina residents raised $3 million dollars for a facility to be built on privately owned land. In the end unless you were a private patient you would have to pay thousands of dollars for local treatment. Even today many local people who do not have private cover have to travel long distances for cancer treatment.
Why have we not seen a delegation of Michael McCormack, Darryl Maguire and Jillian Skinner head to Canberra and petition Tanya Plibersek for extra funding? Why does Mr Maguire have to go hat in hand to NSW Liberal when Tamworth recently received funding and has six palliative beds? Instead they have set up a local bureaucracy made up of State, federal and private interests. All this has done is tie up the decision in red tape as the complicated deal is worked out with a” what’s in it for me mentality”.  
With an aging population and two very large regional centres, why can’t we have public palliative beds for our locals to use with dignity? After telling us that they can get results for this very safe conservative seat it seems that our conservative representatives are putting cost before the interests of Riverina people.
With a Coalition federal government on the cards are we going to see a change of heart from our local representatives? Quotes straight out of the Coalitions health policy include:
“Strong public hospitals providing universal access to care will be a central pillar of our health system under a coalition government”
“Our hospitals need to be responsive to local needs, not dictated to and controlled by head office bureaucrats”
Mr McCormack and Mr Maguire, a shared room with no privacy is not a dignified way for anyone to leave this world. Nor are two rooms in a private hospital going to solve this issue as we face an aging population. Nothing less than an adequate palliative wing in our new base hospital will do.  
While I am sure neither of you will ever have to face this situation with your hefty politician’s income or retirement benefits surely you can put yourself in the shoes of those less fortunate and actually make an effort to give the people of the region access to public palliative beds and some comfort and peace of mind, without expense in their last moments on this earth !

Craig Hesketh