Wow after almost a year later things have gone in a complete circle with the news that the Mersey Hospital is being handed back to the Tasmanian Government:

AFTER all the pork-barrelling and political wrangling, the Mersey Hospital will return to the Tasmanian Government and be run essentially as originally planned before the Howard federal intervention.

The small hospital at Latrobe, near Devonport in Tasmania’s northwest, was handed to the commonwealth during the federal election campaign last year.

John Howard’s intervention, aimed at retaining the then Coalition-held seat of Braddon, promised to save the Mersey from a state government plan to strip it of an intensive care unit.

So a year and a whole lot of political wavering later, the status quo remains.