In some places, particularly rural and regional Australia, forget finding a bulk billing doctor, you struggle to find a doctor at all. Those nine years of nasty cuts and calculated neglect have precipitated the crisis before us today.īulk billing has declined at alarming rates. $50 billion ripped out of public hospitals.Ī tax on every visit to the GP for every man, woman, pensioner and child.Īnd when Labor blocked that vandalism, he responded by freezing Medicare rebates for six long years, ripping billions out of general practice. But the policies he puts forward are more likely to strangle, rather than strengthen it. The new Coalition Health Minister stands here and says he wants to strengthen Medicare. Let’s now fast forward thirty years … to May 2014. That same fee-for-service model that provided rebates to local doctors in 1984 is still largely intact, some forty years later.Īnd as the years have passed, it’s started to show its age. General practice is no longer just a small cottage industry.Īnd our health workforce is now among the best educated in the OECD.īut while Australia has changed a lot, Medicare hasn’t changed much at all. Our health problems are increasingly chronic and complex. Universal healthcare, world leading tobacco control and a revolution in cardiac health, among other innovations, means we now live almost 9 years longer. Medicare succeeded, because it was the right reform for the health needs of the time.Ī fee-for-service rebate schedule that reimbursed small local doctors and specialists for the procedures they did was just what the Australia of 1984 needed.īut Australia has changed, thanks, in some part, to the success of Medicare. When Gough Whitlam created Medibank 50 years ago, the Coalition and the Australian Medical Association fought it, before the Liberals dismantled it altogether.Īnd it was the same when Bob Hawke introduced Medicare nearly 40 years ago.Īt that time, the father of the modern Liberal Party John Howard described bulk billing as “an absolute rort” and threatened to “pull Medicare right apart”. When Ben Chifley introduced the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 75 years ago, he was opposed by the Liberal Party and the British Medical Association. Just like every other time a Labor Prime Minister had tried to introduce universal healthcare, we were opposed by an alliance between the Liberal Party and the doctors’ associations. Our health issues were more episodic and acute.īack then, Medicare was a symbol of modernity. We smoked a lot: 40 per cent of men and 30 per cent of women were regular smokers. In those days … we were younger, on average, and tended not to live as long. Medicare was created to solve the health problems of 1984. “Ghostbusters” is the pinnacle of movie special effects.Īnd in the suburbs of Adelaide a teenager is praying that his mum will buy him a walkman for his 14th birthday. The Ford Falcon is Australia's bestselling car. So cast your mind back – those of you old enough to remember - to 1984.īob Hawke is the Prime Minister and Medicare is in its first year. Now it might seem strange to start a speech on the future of Medicare by talking about the past.īut to understand the future of Medicare, you have to go back to its beginning. The persistent gap in health outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of Australia is proof that a Voice is needed – a Voice that can make representations to the Executive. I offer my respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us today.Īs a nation we stand at a turning point in our relationship with First Nations peoples and if there is one area where hearing from First Nations voices directly would improve outcomes, it is in health. I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we stand, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.
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