Medicare: A Forty Year Health Check

The Centre for Contemporary Histories is proud to support this upcoming event.

1st February 2024
Deakin Downtown

Healthcare experts diagnose fundamental problems with our health system – it remains oriented to acute and episodic illness and curative responses even though we are now in an age of chronic illness, which requires continuing and holistic care, and a more preventative approach. Not only does this disjunction between disease and service provision affect the quality of care, but it also provides incentive for overservicing and overcharging. This event examines how we can best marshal public attitudes and research-based expertise with economic and political imperatives to build a Medicare that is fit for its next forty years.

The Commonwealth Health Minister, Hon Mark Butler MP, will deliver a keynote address, reflecting on the nation-shaping Labor legacy of Medicare and the status of the government’s reform agenda for Medicare.

The event will also examine the place of Medicare in the Australian imagination in comparison to health schemes in other countries; political and bureaucratic management of the Medicare ‘brand’ over the decades; the corporatisation of healthcare; federalism and healthcare; the declining state of public health journalism; the role of unions in the establishment of Medicare, Indigenous and other grassroots and consumer perspectives on Medicare services, and the politics and economics of health care.

In person registrations and more details on speakers are available here.

If you are unable to attend in person, a zoom option is available.