The facts on Medicare dont lie: its affordable and effective without a GP tax Catherine King Another month, another health minister, another reboot of the discredited GP tax, but the same old false arguments. Health minister Sussan Ley is sticking like a barnacle to the hull of the discredited and dishonest justification for the GP tax advanced by her failed predecessor, who took one year in the job to be declared Australia’s worst health minister for 40 years. In her first public appearance this week she repeated Peter Dutton’s claims that because Medicare cost more today than it did 10 years ago, this was proof growth in health funding was “unsustainable”. Despite Ley being unable to produce any data to support her GP tax arguments on RN’s Breakfast program this morning, there is plenty of data out there. It just says the opposite. Three expert reports from impeccable sources have proved in recent months that the argument health spending is “unsustainable” is garbage. Diagnosis 1 came in September from the government’s own Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which revealed in its Health Expenditure Australia 2012–13 report that health expenditure is actually growing at its lowest level since it began keeping records 30 years ago. The report found total spending on health goods and services in Australia was just 1.5% higher for the year. When population growth is taken into account, average annual health spending of $6,430 per person was actually down in real terms. And that is total health spending. The Commonwealth’s health spending in 2012-13 actually fell by 2.4% in real terms. Diagnosis 2 came in October from the world’s most respected economic body, in the latest OECD comparisons of health spending across the developed world. This was a double whammy for the minister, with: Australia’s health outcomes are significantly better than the OECD average. Australia’s health spending (as a percentage of GDP) is lower than the OECD average. According to the OECD, health spending in Australia in 2011 (the most recent year for comparisons) was 9.1% of GDP, below the average of developed nations of 9.3% and just over half the 16.3% the USA spends not keeping a large percentage of its population healthy. Read More: theguardian/commentisfree/2015/jan/16/the-facts-on-medicare-dont-lie-its-affordable-and-effective-without-a-gp-tax?CMP=soc_567
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 01:42:56 +0000
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