Joshi

I'm sending a collection of these to my wife. Any good boob shaped ones?

My bad, fixed

As a sequel to his cowardly failure to condemn genocide Albo now supports the unilateral escalation against Iran

To be clear most professors are senior in their field and usually indicates research as well as teaching, I was in a cantankerous mood this morning. But regardless Medicare needs to take access to specialist treatment seriously.

Yes, obviously medicare would need to increase the rebate and private insurance fees would necessarily increase(as they would now be actually paying for care rather than acting a a gatekeeping mechanism)

Rebate for a short consult with a specialist is $81.55, a long consult is $236.65.

The title professor indicates that they hold a teaching position and says nothing about their clinical skill. Plenty of specialists take the piss and leverage the title to charge ridiculous fees.

In my experience as a GP a reasonable standard fee for a specialist is around $300 with $80 back from Medicare. So yes the Medicare rebate would need to increase substantially but I doubt more than we will save when AUKUS falls through. It is within the capacity of a government with the right priorities. Also increasing the availability of public specialists would be a good companion policy.

IMO there needs to be some regulation around this, a simple measure would be to tie Medicare payments to a pricing structure(eg. a specialist can only charge the Medicare rebate + 20%).

If a specialist wants to charge more then that's fine but the patient(or insurance) will have to pay the full cost

Exactly, it's counter-productive to blame individuals for doing the best they know how in a broken system.

This is awesome, gunna have a showdown with my wife every morning for a while

Has anyone ever suggested engaging Chinese companies to help develop Aussie high speed rail. Seems like an obvious option.

I understand there'd be some dog whistling around it but surely there's no actual sovereign threat if we develop local maintenance capacity.

It's kind of like providing a highly expensive, and logistically complex service requiring recruitment and retention of highly skilled professionals to provide an essential service to people who can't possibly pay for it is not suited to privatization.

20/20 hindsight I guess :/

Why would anyone put pineapple on icecream?

I've been thinking a lot about this issue, obviously with high quality and cheap generative AI essay writing is meaningless for assessment, which is a shame because crafting an essay is an excellent exercise for thinking through a concept.

In my undergrad I wrote a lot of essays but also had a lot of small group tutorials where our contribution contributed to our grade. In medical school assessment outside of examination was almost entirely based on interaction with professors and supervisors. I'm also aware of verbal examination where a professor effectively interrogates a student to assess their knowledge which I think in undergrad settings is mostly historical but could make a comeback, oral examination is used extensively in postgraduate medical training.

For a degree to mean anything assessment needs to be not easily cheated. There are assessment methods that are available although they are less efficient.

If I were running an undergrad humanities degree I'd have essays be 10-20% of the total grade, have a brief 15-20min oral examination and tutorial participation make up the bulk of the grade. I don't know how else a degree can mean anything.