These results prove one thing., page-118

Well they had a good base to work off.

Peter Martin makes the case here, but i think it was over reach.

Scare campaigns only work when they reinforce or add to what is already known.

Within weeks of its election in 2013 the Coalition entertained a proposal from a former advisor to Tony Abbott as health minister to end free visits to the doctor by requiring a mandatory co-payment of $6. Anyone who didn't like it would be invited to take private health gap insurance.

Its Commission of Audit recommended a co-payment of $15 per visit and $5 per concession card holder, and then its first budget announced that "previously bulk-billed patients can expect to contribute $7 towards to cost of standard consultations." Medicare Rebates would be cut by $5 and bulk billing incentives would "only be paid to providers when they collect the $7 patient contribution". It encouraged public hospitals to charge public patients who walked in off the street in order to stem the leakage from doctors.

Seven months later Abbott dumped the $7 co-payment and replaced it with a $5 co-payment, all of which was to come from doctors, also abandoning that a few months later. Then he announced plans to slash the Medicare Rebate for short visits from $37.05 to $16.95, which was abandoned.

In his second budget he extended an existing one-year freeze on the Medicare Rebates by a further five years to 2020.

He booked a budget saving of $57 billion over 10 years by lifting grants to states for running hospitals by much less than the cost of running them