The Commission of Audit recommendations would signal the end of Medicare and fail to help patients, health care industry representatives say.
Proposals include:
- – A $15 payment for all Medicare services including visiting the GP, blood tests and scans
- – Prescription costs to rise to almost $42
- – Expansion of private health insurance to cover GP visits.
Consumer Health Forum chief executive Adam Stankevicius says it is a prescription which would mean the end of universal health care.
“The commission’s manifesto reveals an unhealthy obsession with costs at the expense of access to quality health care for patients,” he said.
Health Minister Peter Dutton has made it clear things are going to change.
In a speech at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney on Thursday, he said Medicare was unsustainable.
“For a population of 23 million to have 263 million free services a year, it’s not sustainable today and it won’t be sustainable in 10 years time,” he said.
We are likely to see many Australians, particularly those with low incomes and chronic disease, simply not seeking medical care until they are very sick and requiring very high cost emergency care.
Alison Verhoeven
Mr Dutton gave the strongest indication yet that private health insurance would be extended to cover GP visits.
“There is no sense an insurer having someone who is pre-diabetic, and that person admitted the hospital at 2:00am, the insurer needs to be involved in the process much earlier on,” he said.
Some in the health sector say proposed changes would only benefit the health insurance industry.
Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association chief executive Alison Verhoeven says the proposed changes are unlikely to help the average Australian.
“With co-payments in both general practice and emergency departments, we are likely to see many Australians, particularly those with low incomes and chronic disease, simply not seeking medical care until they are very sick and requiring very high cost emergency care.”
She says patients would only get universal health coverage if they had money.
Rural health gap will worsen: doctors
Rural doctors say the measures would stop rural and regional patients from visiting the doctor.
“I think the recommendations have been developed with the health of the federal budget in mind and not with the health of Australians living in rural and remote areas taken into much consideration at all,” Rural Doctors Association of Australia chief executive Jenny Johnson said.
“We already know that rural and remote Australians have generally poorer health outcomes than their urban counterparts, that they have poorer access to appropriate primary care services and that they have a greater burden of chronic disease.
“We really should be looking to increase the level of access that rural Australians make of their primary health care services rather than using any measures at all to decrease that access,” she says.
The Federal Government says the measures contained in the Commission of Audit are suggestions only, and not government policy.
Details of any changes to the health system will be revealed in the budget on May 13.
Source: ABC