Introduction: The topic that was assigned to me was health care. Funding for indigenous health care fairly had come to my immediate attention. The reason being is because when I was attending high school in Brisbane some 5 years back, my teachers told me that indigenous people have the worst health of any identifiable group in Australia, they carry a burden of poor health and mortality far in excess of that expected from the proportion they comprise of the total Australian population. In addition, they are left out in the society because the government gives them lands in some remote areas which have relatively poor access to health care. And I heard that this is still a hot issue within Australia when I went to Canada and back to Hong Kong. For the sake of this assignment, apart from gathering information from books and journals, I also had asked a social worker in a hospital about the facts and the status of this issue.
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Action from the 2005 TIFL Grand Final between Puma...Body: Against this background, a report was created by the National Health and Medical Research Council. One of the key findings of this report was that all the expenditure ratios of indigenous to non-indigenous were lower than had previously been assumed. For all services and all sources of funds, recurrent expenditures for indigenous people were estimated at $853 million. This was 2.19% of all recurrent health expenditure in 1995/96. The total spending for indigenous people was only $2320. It also revealed that the pattern of service use by indigenous people is different from other Australians. The former rely much more heavily on publicly provided hospital and community health services and spend much less on private doctors, private hospital care, dentistry, medicines and ancillary services. It is believed that cultural differences, isolation and the structure of...