The impact of specialist fees on government and patient budgets has received little reform attention. This is despite the government’s push for controls in health-care spending and growing evidence of…
The Coalition government has been claiming that Australia’s public health system is unsustainable since the 2014 budget. But its plans for the health system actually reflect the underlying belief that…
Health systems in all wealthier countries face similar problems, but their solutions are widely different. That should mean we can learn from other countries. To explore these differences, this week The…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 Coalition entered the 2013 federal election without a health policy. After a year in government, it remains without one. While there has been activity in the health arena, there’s been little coherent…
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…
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…
Yesterday was a sorry day in the long history of health reform in Australia. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Reform Council issued its five year score-keeper’s report on health reform progress…
It was only seven years ago, but it seems like a lifetime; then-opposition leader Kevin Rudd was promising to end the “blame game” in health-care funding. Fast forward a few years, he’d received a report…
The former Labor government’s GP Super Clinics Program has come in for a bashing. The Coalition has derided it as “a total waste of money” and News Corp has dubbed it a “dangerous health care experiment…
What would Florence Nightingale make of present-day healthcare? Like anyone else, she would probably find much to admire – even much to be in awe of – but just as much of which to disapprove and despair…
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…
Ahead of the May budget, health minister Peter Dutton has said he wants to start “a national conversation about modernising and strengthening Medicare”. A national conversation would be welcome, but is…
The polls this week suggest half of Australians think the Abbott government should reduce the cost of Medicare. My solution? Claw back some of the A$9 billion the government pays to private hospitals…
Public hospital spending has been the single fastest-growing area of government spending over the past decade. As governments, policymakers and economists put health spending under the microscope, it’s…
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne