We’ve recently been informed that the hallmark of Australia’s healthcare system, free basic healthcare may be abolished. The justification is that it’s just one of the steps needed to reduce government spending,. However, this will only save just under $190 million per year. (Which in the context of the Australian federal government spending, is not much).

I thought I would do a bit of a comparison to see how we rank against other countries we would deem “similar” to us to see whether this change is needed or not.

While I acknowledge there is a lot more to this debate than numbers, the reason I wanted to explore this was to see if our healthcare costs were really that out of control (by comparison).



Source: OECD Health Data 2013



Source: OECD Health Data 2013

Source: OECD Health Data 2013

As the graphs above illustrate, government funding into our healthcare system is well and truly behind other developed countries.

While I do acknowledge that as a blanket rule, spending more money doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes, I do believe that a country that’s in the financial position we are, does not need to make changes to Medicare.

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