It's been a great week for jargon. With spring in the air, a whole new season of silly words are being sprung upon us. Or should I say there's a new paradigm in repurposed verbal solutions being run up the flagpole.
My favourite new bit of re-badged English is the use of 'ecosystem' by medical software providers. I thought an ecosystem meant things like swamps and amoeba. In the health computing 'ecosystem' these roles are assigned to Microsoft and GPs. Make what you will of that.
However, this bit of geek jargon was just an aperitif before the main course served up by Medicare in its Orwellian 'compliance review' released last week (link).
The shinybums of Tuggeranong have obviously spent a productive winter hunkered down in Roundabout City, poring over a dictionary of management speak to create some world class jargon.
Take for example, their pyramid of 'compliance'. At the bottom are the huddled masses of informed and well brought up doctors who do not rort the system. This group is termed 'voluntary compliant'. Next on the sliding scale of rort are the minor offenders, who inadvertently forget to dot the i's and cross the t's. These minor offenders are 'accidentally non-compliant'.
Then there are those who seek to pull a fast one. Or to use the official term, perpetrators of 'opportunistic noncompliance inappropriate behaviour'. Let's call them ONIBs.
The ONIBists better watch out because Medicare has got a lot of things - mostly prefaced with the word 'strategic' - that it is planning to do to them.
Those who make honest mistakes will be given the opportunity to explain and "rectify their errors," says Human Services Minister Joe Ludwig, sounding like a sloganeer from the Cultural Revolution.
"Those who confess will be treated leniently - those who resist will be smashed!" as the Red Guards would say.
Meanwhile back in the real world, we hear of busy GPs getting a Medicare inquisition for 'abnormally high claiming patterns' when they try 'do their bit' and take on more patients when other local doctors retire.
In the Medicare ecosystem, the GP will soon be extinct.
It's been a great week for jargon. With spring in the air, a whole new season of silly words are being sprung upon us. Or should I say there's a new paradigm in repurposed verbal solutions being run up the flagpole.
