Health Concerns in Austrialia

Political Variables:
Health is one the most essential and controversial issues in Australia politics and in this case it leads to the conflict between the Commonwealth and the State government. The Primary Health Care Reform in Australia, Report to Support Australia's First National Primary Health Care Strategy 2009 report says the Australian health care system is multi-tiered and is comprised of organizations that are funded and organized by a range of different methods including Government (publicly funded) and Private Sector (privately funded). And the Commonwealth government is the major funders and therefore the National Health Reform Agreement (Council of Australian Governments, 2011) distributed the responsibility of health to the Commonwealth government whilst the State government dominates the major responsibility in health. While the State and Territory government are responsible for the hospitals, the Australian government is responsible for primary health care system. The responsibility for the Australian government include promoting equitable and timely access to GP and primary health care services, system management, policy and funding for GP and primary health care services and working with each State and Territory on system-wide policy and state-wide planning for GP (Department of Health, 2013, p. 2). Therefore their policy needs to be based on the assumption that it promotes equitable and timely access to GP. The co-payment contradicts the concept of 'equitable' since their impact varies amongst different groups. Moreover, Rainford (2014) suggests it creates extra $2 billion expenditure for the State government due to the shifts in demand for the hospital emergency department rather than visiting GP. Additionally,...

... middle of paper ...

...ions.
Conclusion:
In order to achieve health wellbeing, the co-payment plan should be rejected since it poses negative effects on health especially for the underprivileged people and deterioration in health intervention due to the decreased efficiency in primary health care system. This lack of short term financial resources could not be full-filled by a $5 surcharge. In the ABC news video (2014), health policy expert Jennifer argued that key to maintain health care budget in other international countries is maintaining well-resourced and cost effective primary sector and creating the synergy between GP, nurses and other allied health practitioners. Therefore this policy is not efficient and needs to be rejected for future. Strong primary health care system yields positive outcomes in a long term since it helps to save finance and avoid the aggravation of illness.