>How do the single payer folks on this list expect to win? That's what
I'm
>not hearing. Zero strategy, zero power analysis.
Get Democrates to make arguments like this one Julia Gillard made recently in Australia:
Health costs and spending
Let’s look at the facts.
In 2003-04 our spending on health services increased by $6.1 billion from the previous year, and reached a staggering $78 billion. This is the equivalent to 9.7 per cent of GDP, up from 9.5 per cent in 2002-03 and up from 8.3 per cent a decade ago.
On a per person basis, this equates to $3919 per person, and an increase from the previous year by $267.
Interestingly, the USA spends about $US5300 per capita on health care, but somehow you wouldn’t know it. Health outcomes are poorer than in Australia and some 45 million people have no health insurance cover at all.
Of course, in Australia, about 70 per cent of spending in health is funded by governments and the average annual growth rate for the last 10 years for this health spending has been 5.6 per cent.
The majority of this spending goes to hospitals and Medicare services. It is well known that the PBS has been the fastest growing element of Government health expenditure.
However health care costs in the private sector are also growing very fast, with consequent increases in private health insurance premiums.
When budget spending in a specific area is outstripping growth and inflation, you need to sit up and take notice, with or without an ageing population.
But the Howard Government has not answered these cost pressures with a drive for system wide reform, a drive to manage costs and maximize efficiency.
Instead it has been content to sit back and leave costs unmanaged.
Australians are also paying more out of their own pockets to access health services, and are getting less help to meet this cost. At the same time that total health spending has nearly hit 10 per cent of GDP, out-of-pocket costs on health has grown, in real terms, by 6.2 per cent in 2003-04 compared to 5 per cent in the previous year.
Private health funds are also contributing less to non-government health expenditure, declining by over 10 per cent in the last 10 years from 32.8 in 1993-04 to 22.3 per cent in 2003-04.
This explains the growth in out-of-pocket costs, which grew 5.4 per cent a year as individuals spent $16.2 billion covering these costs.
ABS data also tells us that average households are spending 40 per cent more on health than it did five years ago. And, perhaps more telling, are the ABS statistics which tell us that the higher your income the more you are devoting to health spending.
Since 2001, when the Howard Government first introduced its increased focus on private health cover, health costs as a percentage of GDP have increased substantially. International comparisons show clearly that the more fragmented the system, the higher the health costs.
Best, Mike B)
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