The difference between $60 and $90 is the critical concept.
Mathematicians are working around the clock to ensure that health minister Mark Butler knows the difference between $60 and $90, it has emerged.
Labor has promised a much needed and long overdue injection of cash into general practice. However, the new incentives mean that bulk billing will still only attract $60 compared with an average fee of $90 for a private consultation.
Number theorist Professor Candid, whose work on Ricci flow with sexy numbers man Cedric Villani earned him the Fields Medal, told The Medical Republic: “Quite why Labor thinks GPs will revert to bulk billing is beyond me: it’s obvious that $90 is more than $60! But then, they are politicians and not mathematicians.”
Professor Candid and his team have been working round the clock with Mr Butler to try to make him understand the crucial difference between the two quantities.
“We wrote the numbers down on a piece of paper but that didn’t seem to work, and then we thought maybe numbers were a little bit too abstract for him, so we showed him a picture of 60 ducks and a picture of 90 ducks and asked him to point to the one which one has the most ducks on it. He only got it right 40% of the time, which is less than my Labrador Elsie!”
Thinking Mr Butler might be more of a kinaesthetic than an abstract or visual learner, Professor Candid then took him on a trip to the park.
“We put a 90kg man on one side of a seesaw and a 60kg woman on the other. For a brief moment there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, the rousing and ethereal music from A Beautiful Mind started to play, but then it faded away again as Mr Butler asked to have a go on the swings.”
It’s only been a week but the professor and his team are beginning to suspect that Mr Butler might actually have known the difference the whole time and that the $8.5 billion he promised was in fact just a cynical ploy to force an undecided and ill-informed electorate to vote for Labor.
