Media Conference - AMA President, Dr Bill Glasson and Dr Tony Lawler AMA President (Tasmania), Hobart - Medical indemnity insurance; Tasmanian health environment

GLASSON:      Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.   I'm Bill Glasson the Federal AMA President, and Dr Tony Lawler who's obviously the Tasmanian AMA President, and we thank you for coming here this afternoon.

I want to make a couple of general statements.  First of all about the issue of?

GLASSON:      Look, go and ask the community out there.  And I could tell you the community out there will be saying to you we want more money put into our health system.  If you haven't got health, what have you got?   You've got nothing.  And so we've got an ageing community out there that we've got to address.  

Our demands on the health system are no doubt increasing day by day and as you said, if some of that money can go towards resolving this problem, or underfunding, providing some of the funding required to get the changes that we need along with the Medicare funding, I think the community will give the Government 100 per cent support.

I don't there's - I think that the tax cuts they're proposing, the few extra dollars you'll end up in your pocket compared to the loss of the Medical work force out there is not even, needs to be compared.

So I think the community supports the Government in putting more money into health, both at a public system, and I remind people that the public system out there is falling apart from under funding - we need more money for the public system, but we also need some underpinning, financial underpinning of the structural changes that we're asking for in relation to this reform package in the medical indemnity.

Ends