With Mikayla Novak and Tim Wilson
Executive Summary
- The demands on Australia’s health care sector will increase considerably as the Australian population ages.
- The regulatory burden on health care professionals is increasing and is coming at the expense of fulfilling their primary purpose of providing health care services.
- Health care providers may be required to liaise with up to 100 health care regulators with nearly 80 commonwealth regulators and between 15 and 20 in each state.
- There are now more than 22,600 pages of combined state and federal legislation across 305 different Acts of Parliament covering the health sector.
- There are unnecessary disparities in regulation for health care providers between States which cause confusion and increase the barriers to establishing new health care facilities.
- The cost of regulation is rising rapidly. For example, the estimated compliance burden on general practice for enhanced primary care has grown by nearly 900 per cent between 2002-02 and 2007-08.
- General Practitioners are becoming the interface for approval for Australians to access other government services such as welfare and support services draining their time to provide health care.
- Licensing arrangements for different health care facilities from state to state add confusion to the capacity for new and existing health care providers to operate across the country.
- The pharmaceuticals industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in Australia and faces annual costs of at least $89 million to receive regulatory approval for sale. Much of this cost is duplicating work to seek regulatory approval already commenced or resolved overseas.
- The average time frame for regulatory approval for a new medicine can be as high as 160 days resulting in the slower introduction of life saving or extending medicines.
- The most effective way to decrease private health insurance premiums is not government regulation, but competition in health insurance products.
Australia’s health care needs significant regulatory reform to ensure it can deliver the services expected of it with an ageing population.