I don’t think it was so much an overreaction to Covid or excessive spending, I think it was more a case of not spending in the right way, so most of what was spent was wasted.

The whole point of lockdowns was to slow the spread to allow medical services time to increase the capacity to deal with a higher volume of patients, but that didn’t really happen. If they had spent their money on things that would increase capacity, streamline process etc. it would have led to the ability to clear a lot of backlog of patients, reduce ramping etc. when that capacity was not needed for Covid. That obviously hasn’t happened.

I don’t work in the hospitals but I expect the experience there was similar to my organisation - the potential problems were ignored early on when it would have been the best time to do something, then when Covid hit a lot of money got splashed around on short-term initiatives so managers could feel they were doing something (thanks for the free food, but really a waste of money), but no effective longer term changes were met. This is combined with workers leaving because of overwork and insufficient staff numbers and pay making it hard to recruit and retain new people, which is the culmination of years/decades of insufficient funding.

Having gone through a few royal comissions at work I can quite confidently say it won’t do anything. A few executives get tossed out, some minor cosmetic changes get made and the staff all get new uniforms with the new logo on it. All of the real systemic and funding problems that are the root cause remain.