The government doesn't actually "have" any money. There seems to be some confusion about this in general. It all comes out of each other's back pockets, and once it has trickled through the red tape and excessive madness of bureau-crazy, it ends up costing a lot more than it should. We never know the true cost of government funded medicine, but I'm going to hunt it down one day and shock everyone. How much are you really paying?

Why do midwives have to be a government funded option? I might be all over a private midwife in a home-birth situation (I voted undecided on this poll for this reason), but as a choice I would never, ever expect anyone else to pay for it.

Public hospitalisation is there for emergencies. A home birth option doesn't fall under the emergency umbrella no matter how you view it. It just doesn't.

Yes, I know how well received a libertarian's opinions are when it comes to health care ... but
i guess that depends on how you look at it - we all pay a medicare levy, which is there to fund public health care - so isn't this something that should be funded? public hospitalisation isn't there JUST for emergencies, it's for treatment of any condition deemed to require treatment - birth included. wouldn't it ultimately reduce the expenses on the public coffers? if the volume of "on call" ob's in the public system were ultimately reduced because they were only called upon when genuinely needed?

i'm not going to claim to know what cost there is to getting something like this happening, but the cost wasn't the question - it was whether we'd use it. i answered yes - as, in my mind, i've had every part of this journey "medicalised" and don't want to go down that path with giving birth - but i'd also like the back up of the birthing centre being near a hospital if an emergency arose.

i think there will always be a huge divide in the community whilst so many people continue to see birth as a medical procedure, not a natural progression of pregnancy (which can go wrong admittedly, but not as often as we're led to believe). i don't think that encouraging midwife led care, and using some of the tax dollars that we're handing over to pay for it is necessarily a bad thing!