Archive for category: NEWS & ARTICLES

Health Minister Greg Hunt

The government’s focus on private health insurance premiums ignores the real costs of a two-tiered system. Health minister Greg Hunt’s private health insurance announcement might have promised to make the system “simpler and more affordable” but it delivered more for private health insurers’ bottom lines than for Australians’ budgets. It also highlighted the contorted, confused and controversial logic that underpins the government’s push for taxpayers to finance a two-tiered healthcare system. Read more

The Department of Health will open up the economic modelling of all general practices in the Health Care Home trials, including corporate participants. Assistant secretary Janet Quigley revealed the plan after being quizzed about the representative mix of the experiment to apply team-based, bundled-payment care systems for chronically ill patients. Read more

More Australian patients are visiting their doctor without having to pay than ever before, with GP bulk billing rates for the March 2017 quarter increasing to 85.6% compared to 85.1% in the same quarter last year, according to the Department of Health.

This is the highest bulk billing rate for any March quarter since the inception of Medicare.

During July 2016 to March 2017, patients received 228.1 million bulk billed Medicare services – representing an additional 7.3 million fully subsidised services compared to the same period 12 months earlier.

Over this period Australians accessed 110.2 million GP services – an increase of 3.6 million services.

The total cost of all Medicare benefits paid during this period was $16.3 billion, an increase of 2.8%.

Simple reforms to Australia’s health system could help save more than $320 million a year on avoidable hospital admissions and provide better care for people with diabetes, asthma, heart disease and other chronic conditions, according to a Grattan Institute report.

The primary health system, Australians’ first point of contact for health care, was designed in and for another era and is now failing in the prevention and management of chronic disease, the heaviest burden on today’s health system.

The government spends more that $1 billion each year on planning, coordinating and reviewing chronic disease management, yet many people with chronic conditions do not receive best care and end up having hospital stays that could have been avoided with better care.

More details and the full report are here

The “disillusioned” GPs from the Lockridge Medical Center in WA have received a reply from the Minister for Health after expressing concerns about the plans to artificially cap rental rates for co-located pathology centres. The original letter is here and the reply is here.

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