Consumers Are Cinderellas In The Health Care Debate
The Age
Tuesday April 29, 2003
Australia's health care debate is appalling. Medical lobbies want more and more subsidies and hand-outs while restricting access to their professions. Health insurers want taxpayer subsidies to survive as so-called businesses. And the left wants public hospitals to be given more money so the supply of beds can grow to meet the growth in demand for high-cost services induced by specialists with high-cost lifestyles to maintain.
All the financial incentives in our health system favour repeat business for the industry rather than illness prevention and health maintenance for the consumer. Yet in no other field is the consumer voice so absent. In a provider-driven health system, politicians set out to woo the providers; industry subsidies and hand-outs are the order of the day.
Root-and-branch reform of the health system is needed. Financial incentives need to favour practitioners who collaborate rather than run precious cottage industries; GPs need to be rewarded for keeping their patients healthy and out of their surgeries; consumers need health brokers to guide them in purchasing the best services in a fragmented system.
Governments need to concentrate on enabling consumers and their agents to make cost-conscious decisions about health care to rein in costs and introduce some market discipline in an out-of-control industry.
Vern Hughes, Consumers for Health Reform, Yarraville
© 2003 The Age