To the Editor: The Editor’s article on health reform and the Australian Health Care Summit,1 in which he expressed sentiments with which I agree, included a Box setting out the “egalitarian and socially cohesive principles underpinning Australia’s healthcare” reaffirmed by the Summit.

However, the Box contained a Christmas tree and an invitation to readers to enter a poem in the MJA’s Christmas Competition 2003. Among the lines were: “’Tis Christmas, the season to be kind”.

While obviously the result of a glitch in the production process, you managed — much to the envy of other editors and publishers seriously wounded by such glitches (to the extent that entire print runs have had to be pulped and then reprinted) — to fall on your feet.

I could not think of a better (or more comprehensive) set of principles to underpin our healthcare system than those embodied in the message and spirit of Christmas.

Perhaps God moves in mysterious ways.

To the Editor: 9/15 was disaster day at the MJA.1 Not only was the Editor guilty of printing perseveration, but his “Box” seems to have been transmogrified from . . . “(the) socially cohesive principles underpinning Australia’s healthcare” to an invitation to “expose” the readers of the Christmas journal to some “witty prose”.

Perhaps the “healthcare dialogue” has indeed been reduced to rhyming couplets, possibly accompanied by the health ministers fiddling while the rest of us burn?

In reply: Fate (or God) moves in both mysterious and wondrous ways. Maybe the manoeuvring and machinations of our health ministers in the consummation of the 2003–2008 Australian Health Care Agreements are worthy of:

All I can say is that the faux pas in the production process shows that, despite its high technology, it is still a human process. To err is human, so let’s not make a very public faux pas all consuming.