No health funding crisis - experts

Another day and another Lieberal budget lie exposed. This time it's the lie that current health spending is "unsustainable" bla.... Well what do you know, this is as much of a lie as the "budget emergency" lie. According to those at the coalface who're directly involved, there is no health funding crisis. In fact our health system is doing very well by international standards, and is cheap as well.

"Australia is not generous in terms of the amount of money we put into health through government," said Professor Richardson, foundation director of the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University. 

Commonwealth health spending is currently about $65 billion a year or a little more than 4 per cent of GDP. It is forecast to rise to 7 per cent of GDP by 2050. But even if Australia reached that figure, the government would still be spending less on health as a proportion of GDP than currently spent by OECD countries such as Germany, the United States, Japan and Britain. 

A modest rise in health spending was inevitable as Australians grew richer and older, said the chief economist of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia, Saul Eslake, adding that "to call it unsustainable is probably an exaggeration". 

Far from having a health funding crisis, Australia had "one of the best health systems in the world", said Stephen Duckett, health program director at the Grattan Institute. 

"We are less than the OECD average on health spending per capita," he said. "We're better than the OECD average on life expectancy. So we're actually in the healthcare system sweet spot." Read more