Closing down hospital beds and boosting access to primary care rather than slugging consumers with a co-payment might be a better way to ensure the long-term viability of our health system, say a number of the nation’s leading health professionals. This was just one idea floated at the recent Healthy Ageing Round Table held by The Australian Financial Review in partnership with GE in Sydney. The purpose of the round table was to discuss how we best cope with a quickly ageing population considering the “ageing tsunami” is constantly trotted out as a key reason for the budget emergency in the health sector. Yet while the federal government tells us we’re living beyond our means and the health system is unsustainable, the real problem lies in policy development or, more pertinently, lack of policy according to round table participants. Health policy adviser and former director general of NSW and Queensland Health, Mick Reid, put it most succinctly when he said: “The crisis has been overstated and the policy response has been disproportionate to the circumstances.” Reid worries unnecessary fear has been engendered in the community and as a result we’re starting to lose our sense of fair play and egalitarianism and that’s flowing through into areas such as health policy development. Chairman of the Western Sydney Local Health District Professor Stephen Leeder agrees much of the federal government’s health policy seems to disproportionately affect those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and seems to have been made on the run. “I would argue we seem to have entered a new phase in the life of the nation, where vast numbers of health decisions of tremendous significance appear to be made without the slightest deference to the idea of policy formation. If policy is not being debated it’s very hard to put anything on the agenda,” Professor Leeder says.