Healthcare in Australia

  1. 722 Posts.
    I want to preface this post by explaining that I have worked in an acute health care setting since graduating from JCU and I am very passionate concerning the health of Australian citizens. Further, I am posting this in the hope of intelligent discussion and all references will be included for people who wish to fact check or simply educate themselves further.

    Medicare gives all citizens and residents access to primary health-care services. It is primarily funded via an income tax levy of 1·5%, supplemented by direct government health spend. The current annual health budget is $62billion, but Dutton claims that this may rise to $75billion by 2016-17. Further, it should be clarified that the health budget includes all health expenditure policies such as, private health insurance, pharmaceutical benefits scheme, public hospitals and NDIS. The principle of free national health coverage is well established in Australia. However, among a population of 23 million, 11 million people have some form of private health insurance. Consequently, Dutton's call to further "grow the opportunity for those Australians who can afford to do so to contribute to their own healthcare costs" (
    The cost of health care in Australia).
    .

    According to the Budget Paper no. 1 (2013–14) spending on Medicare for the current financial year is estimated to be $19.0 billion and is forecast to grow to $23.6 billion in 2016–17. Medicare is the fourth most expensive program after payments to the states, support for seniors (mainly the aged pension) and family tax benefits
    (http://www.budget.gov.au/2013-14/content/bp1/download/bp1_consolidated.pdf).

    Expenditure on Medicare covers benefits paid for services listed in the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS), including GP visits, specialist consultations and operations in private hospitals. This clearly states the limitations of Medicare and supports the argument of mine when considering where the bulk of health is actually spent. (http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliam...FlagPost/2014/February/How-much-Medicare-cost).

    Meanwhile, revenue from the Medicare levy—a 1.5% levy on taxable income—is estimated to total $10.3 billion in 2013–14, but is forecast to grow by nearly 60% to $16.2 billion in 2016–17. The levy is to be raised to 2% from July 2014, to help fund the NDIS, which accounts for some of this forecast growth. It should be noted that the Medicare levy only partially offsets the cost of Medicare; the remaining funds are drawn from taxation revenue (http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliam...FlagPost/2014/February/How-much-Medicare-cost).

    The money raised by the increase in the Medicare levy will be placed into the
    DisabilityCare Australia Fund, which will only be drawn upon to fund the additional costs of delivering DisabilityCare Australia. Virtually all taxpayers will still be paying less income tax than they would have under the 2007-08 tax scales, due to the Government’s three rounds of tax cuts and the tripling of the tax-free threshold (http://www.budget.gov.au/2013 14/content/bp1/download/bp1_consolidated.pdf).

    The setting in which I work consumes 43% of the health budget Australia wide for public hospitals. This is becoming increasingly unsustainable and the reason for such a detailed post. There was approximately 10 million hospitalisations last year in the acute setting, 6 million private and 4 million public. This equate to a total of 27.7 million patient days or 18.8 million for public and 8.9 million for private. The health service provided 2.5 million surgeries of which 300 000 were emergency (http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=60129547000).


    During my lunch break, I decided to see the catering and meal preparation women. They informed me that they charge the hospital around $50.00, per patient, per day, for all meals and snacks. This is an annual cost to the taxpayer of $1.35 billion just in patient meals considering we had 27.7 million patient days.

    In conclusion, Medicare while requiring a substantial portion of the health budget is not the real underlying concern for health expenditure. Further, patients with chronic illnesses need to visit GP’s in order to sustain adequate health and thus negating the dependency or need of the public health acute care system.

    I hope this has been informative for people in understanding more on Medicare and how the health care system in Australia really works.
    Last edited by falcons09: 04/03/15
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