Australia has a relatively strong health system by international standards, but it needs a makeover. To generate fresh ideas, The Conversation is profiling five international health systems that have important…
Most hospitals in Norway and Sweden are government-owned.
Ariadna De Raadt/Shutterstock
Australia has a relatively strong health system by international standards, but it needs a makeover. To generate fresh ideas, The Conversation is profiling five international health systems that have important…
Our life expectancy improvements essentially mirrored other comparable countries.
Kristo-Gothard Hunor/Shutterstock
There is an old joke about one fish asking another about the state of the water and the other answering “what’s water?” When you’re immersed in something and that is your daily experience, you are not…
Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation and Fron Jackson-Webb, The Conversation
Australia’s health system isn’t perfect but it performs well internationally. This infographic shows how Australia’s health expenditure, access to care and health outcomes compare with seven other OECD…
The US is the international outlier on returns on investments in health care.
Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock
Australia has a relatively strong health system by international standards, but it needs a makeover. To generate fresh ideas, The Conversation is profiling five international health systems that have important…
Cut waste before cuttings access or quality.
Phalinn Ooi/Flickr
Health policy debate over the past few months has been held to a $7 ransom. It’s as if the Medicare co-payment has been deified as the solution to all the health system’s ills. Of course, the $7 co-payment…
Holidays: sun, sea, surf and surgery?
Gerard Stolk
Medical tourism is often associated with an image of sun, sand and surgery; patients travelling mostly from rich countries in the global North to exotic destinations for medical treatments at a lower cost…
The poorest households already spend more than a fifth of their disposable income on health care.
Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock
Many poor families already pay a significant proportion of their household income on health care co-payments and will face increasing financial pressure with a proposed additional A$7 charge, according…
As the queue grows, small increases in waiting times soon turn into dramatic spikes.
Fotoluminate LLC/Shutterstock
The introduction of a GP co-payment could see average emergency department visits increase by between six minutes and almost three hours, new modelling shows, as more patients opt for free hospital care…
In the absence of evidence, the real reason for cuts to health spending may well be ideological.
Alan Porritt/AAP
The unsustainability of government health expenditure in Australia is a myth that has been carefully nurtured to justify policies to transfer costs from government to the public. Tomorrow’s budget is expected…
We’re unlikely to solve persistent challenges to the health system, such as ensuring equitable access to well-coordinated care, with quick fixes.
AAP Image/Quentin Jones
In the lead-up to the budget, the story of crisis has been hammered home, but there’s more to a country than its structural deficit. So how is Australia doing overall? In this special series, ten writers…
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) is the tenth largest Commonwealth Government program, now costing over $9 billion a year.
Taki Steve/Flickr
When it comes to pharmaceuticals expenditure, the National Commission of Audit’s proposals rate highly on any policy change scale. Its two main recommendations are designed to reduce the overall cost to…
For general patients, the minimum co-payment would be A$15.
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The Commission of Audit’s proposals about GP co-payments are just that, proposals. They are not government policy, nor should they be. Some aspects of the Commission’s recommendations are good. But the…
The Commission report recommends private health insurers take on a greater role in Australia’s health system.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
The National Commission of Audit has made 86 recommendations with a focus on the federal government’s 15 biggest and fastest-growing areas of spending. Health is near the top of the list, with the Commission…
Fixing the pricing of combination therapies could save around A$120 million a year.
Bart/Flickr
Last week, Treasurer Joe Hockey made a “case for change” in the way government spends money. His focus was largely on macro policy settings, such as pension entitlements, including access to schemes such…
Replacing registered and enrolled nurses with lower-skilled workers leads to poorer patient outcomes.
DIBP images
A shortage of qualified nursing staff and rising health costs have led to an increase in the employment of unregulated nursing workers. In 2012, the average weekly salary for full-time nursing professionals…
It passes the ‘milk bar test’ but once you look behind it, big risks emerge.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Like a movie zombie, a policy idea that should have died has arisen from the dead and is likely to feature as a cost-savings measure in next month’s budget. The idea is simple: most GP patients should…
With the right training and supervision, assistants could safely take on 15% of nurses’ workloads.
John Keith/Shutterstock
Employees are the public hospital system’s most valuable resource, and its biggest cost. Wages account for nearly 70% of recurrent hospital spending. To keep hospital care affordable in a time of rising…
One person’s rationing may be another’s priority setting.
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In the lead-up to the May budget, the seemingly inexorable rise in health spending has unleashed a “sustainability panic”: rhetoric that health system costs are out of control and drastic measures are…
There is no publicly available, solid evidence to show that such outsourcing generates savings for governments. But it could.
Alexander Tihonov/Shutterstock
In the lead-up to the budget on May 13, the Tony Abbott government is looking for ways to make the health dollar go further. In 2011-12 the federal government spent A$14.4 billion on public and private…
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne