History
The PBS was established in 1948 by supplying approximately 140 lifesaving and disease-preventing drugs. The PBS was introduced by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley as part of wider plans to create a British-style National Health Service, but the High Court of Australia soon ruled most of Chifley's health care plans as unconstitutional. However, the PBS was not ruled as unconstitutional. Medicines on the PBS list were free to the consumer until 1960, when nominal user charges were introduced.
Read more about this topic: Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)