The solution to the housing affordability problem is relatively simple. All we have to do is ...

stop building houses, and start building hospitals instead.

I’m certain that all sides of the political spectrum have had a passing thought about this. It is actually just a simple supply and demand problem. As it is now, the ratio of housing supply to demand is quite heavily skewed in favour of the housing demand side.

So what’s to be done about it?

There is one way in which we could achieve this.

Build many more hospitals and simply not need them.

It would be amazing if this can actually work.

A few things to consider:

Almost all of our current hospital spending goes towards tertiary care. Most primary care (general practice) and secondary care (ambulance, emergency etc) spending is on hospitals. We already pay about $5 in Medicare, so $5 of your hospital spend is already locked in.

We already spend about $9 billion on private hospitals for elective surgery, and around $2 billion on private hospital for elective imaging. There is virtually no need for these in terms of frequency or outcomes.