Which reminds me......
I used to work for a public maternity hospital here in Sydney, managing its computer systems.
Case in point.
A german national women down under for a family funeral needed urgent medical help, she was "medicare ineligible".
We treated her and billed her the grand total of.........Nothing
We had as part of our budgetary provisions a 100k reserve for just such cases.
Do all tourists get free medical care here ? No they dont, it needs to be an emergency case. And its not something we publiscise, you are only hearing about because as computer manager i was privy to the billing systems and the parameters of the "medicare ineligible" code within the system.
Once that 100k per annum was spent we had to get special approval from the Dept of Health for extra MI cases, which were reviewed on a case by case basis.
Up to that 100k pa it was an inhouse decision.
Its a classic example of compassion and charity balanced by the sensible checks and balances they require.
Oh this brings back memorys
I got paid a good wage in this job, sick leave holidays, long service leave (after 10 years i got 3 months long service leave on full pay plus a 17 percent lsl bonus)
Its a the job i am most proud of in my career.
I went on 24 hour call by choice, and not once charged overtime.
I subscribed at my own expense to a pager service to facilitate this
Eventually i purchased a pair of modems with a baud rate of 600 bps (hard to believe these days) one for the mainframe and one for my place and borrowed an unused digital VT100 terminal , so i could fix the easy stuff from home.
For example if the backup at 2 in the morning fell over (not enough disk space on the backup volume) it would leave the patient master index file and admissions systems locked. Many was the night i would get paged out of bed and would use this setup to unlock the PMI from home. But if i had to go on site in the middle of the night i did so.
Given my predecessor was happy to leave these issues unfixed until 9:00 am the next working day, i was very popular amoungst staff and management for this above and beyond approach.
I am very proud to have served my society in this way. working for the dept of health was the most rewarding job i ever had, i still miss it and even dream about it some nights
