The Australia Card , . . . by stealth.

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On one of the darkest days Labor has ever seen, when a serving Australian Prime Minister was politically executed by his deputy and her power base of Faction leaders and Trade Union power brokers within one night of number crunching and so seamless was the deed that the now ex PM declared the position of Labor Party Leader vacant to the caucus and did not even put his hand up as a potential candidate leaving Gillard as the only nominee and thusly elected leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party and therefore also the new Prime Minister, further business went almost unnoticed later that evening in the Senate.

LABOR'S controversial electronic healthcare identifier legislation passed in the Senate the same day as Julia Gillard did the devastatingly disloyal deed to her Party Leader, however without any of the media hysteria and against the wishes of the people in terms of it's close relationship with the Australia Card which was given a resounding no by the community.

Two bills -- Healthcare Identifiers Bill 2010 and Healthcare Identifiers (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2010 -- were passed with government amendments and after several delays.

Medicare will be equipped to start issuing a unique, 16-digit healthcare identifier to every Australian from July 1. Doctors, hospitals, healthcare organisations and allied health providers will receive similar identifiers.

So what does this mean?

It means that the government will effectively own your medical information as it will all be recorded against your number and be on their system, out on the public domain of the Internet for ease of access by the relevant people. Not You.

Those in government who are pushing it say it is needed so that the waiting lists in our hospitals will be shortened because doctors will have all our information at hand and won't be wasting time looking for it, Hello! sorry but that is all done at reception , . . before you get in the line and begin the hours of waiting.

They also say that it will stop people "doctor shopping" which means people who have a dependency on prescription drugs will go to several doctors and present with the same symptoms to get several prescriptions for their drug of choice, it won't while there are doctors who accept cash or credit cards this will continue to happen.

Further they claim that our personal health is not a privacy issue because we happily present when we are ill and the doctor and staff know us and what our ailment is, wrong, they may do , but they are not the government and they are not allowed to divulge the information to anyone else.

My Theory

One of the biggest industries in Australia would love to know our personal health history, the insurance industry.

Consider that all of our information is to be entered into the system eventually (I suspect that it will be a requirement for Doctor's offices to comply with an order to get everyone who visits their office onto the system immediately and upload their complete history at that time, and eventually upload the details of every patient they have ever seen over time) and the government permits access to that information for the purpose of verifying that the insurance claim they are about to pay out for does not stem from an undeclared pre existing condition, there's the start, they may now have access to your complete medical history, these are people (bean counters) who are not in the medical profession and who have no Hippocratic oath and are not bound by the same privacy code that medical professions are.

Further I suspect that the issuing of the 16 digit number with be followed by a card with a chip, and guess what, . . .no card, no treatment!

You will now have your Australia card. Like it or not.



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