Page 1837 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 June 2014
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Certainly, if the system is broke then fix it. Fund early intervention and primary healthcare services; fund the gaps that have appeared in the health budgets around the country. But do not divert $2 to the doctors and their practices, which will barely cover the administration cost of collecting the revenue, while sending $5 to a new medical research future fund. If we are to have a world-class medical research program—the largest in the world, if we are hearing things correctly—then surely that should not come at the cost of actual human beings’ real and immediate health—people today that have real problems.
And in any case, what do we know about this medical research future fund? Was it something that Messrs Abbott, Hockey and Dutton took to the federal election? Was it the reason people voted for them? No. We know very little about its purpose, really, and certainly it is unclear why sick people should be paying directly from their pockets for this into the future. Voters certainly were not told that the Liberals planned to introduce co-payments to Medicare. I did not hear it once during the election campaign.
I think it is worth also reflecting on the actual administration costs of this program. A report recently appeared in Crikey! which cited the German example of a similar system where the administrative burden, the administrative cost, was so substantial that the German parliament ultimately voted to remove the entire system. It simply proved to be an enormous cost.
Certainly, we have seen some of the issues raised around that, around practices needing to charge people when they go for pathology tests. There is the prospect of those facilities having to start taking cash payments, and the security issues that go with that. All of these are consequences that are in addition to the very substantial health issues that I think this co-payment raises.
Over 50 per cent of Canberrans rely on bulk-billing for their GP visits; I think it is actually around 53 per cent at the moment. This is no small number of people who are going to be directly impacted by this policy. These patients are expected to bring in around $5 million annually through individual co-payments. That is a large burden, especially given that it is not coming from a tax on luxury goods but on essential health services. The contradictions in this policy are multiple, and the federal government must be told that we as a community are calling them out on this, the meanest tax in what is, frankly, a pretty ordinary budget.
As my federal colleague Dr Richard Di Natale has noted, the Greens believe that Medicare is one of the great Australian public policy success stories. It may not be perfect, but for 30 years it has delivered health care fairly and efficiently. It means that everyone gets access to high-quality health care, no matter what the size of their wallet or whether they are unlucky enough to be born with a chronic disease.
The federal government’s campaign to steer Australia towards the US system is not about balancing the books and it is not about improving our health. It is about chipping away at an institution that does not sit well with their views on how a government should work.
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