Old, sick, poor, will stop taking meds - health economist

Despite the gov continuing with it's line that nobody believes, that the budget is fair, it's plain and clear as day that it's not. I'm reminded of this graphic for example:

Yet the gov still tries to argue that black is white. Not mentioned in the graphic are pensioners, and people like me on the DSP.

The gov actually seems to think that I can afford to pay over $30 for a typical doctor visit, on a pension. They have absolutely no idea of what it's like to struggle with money, or be in a position where all the money you have is for survival without any so called "discretionary" money. The money simply gets used up, often before I get paid again, even with just the current $6 per prescription charge. 

So how in the hell am I supposed to absorb these extra costs? I simply wouldn't be able to. Like I said, it would make a difficult money situation completely impossible. I'll be faced with the choice of either eating or deciding which of the 6 meds I take a day I'm going to cut out. Simple arithmetic. Strange that Hockey thinks he can run an economy but he can't even add up a few numbers to see what such extra costs would do to me. That's what happens when you don't listen to people.

Not to mention the psychological impacts of being in such a hopeless situation. I myself fear some will take their own lives than live in such impossible misery.

Now health economists have warned that pensioners will in fact be making such choices if the budget goes through. 

But an assistant professor from the Centre for Health Services at the University of Western Australia, Anna Kemp, said there was no evidence for the relationship between spending on prescription medicines and on unproven drugs. 

“The department is assuming that those people using prescription medicines are the same people using unproven treatments, but there isn’t any evidence to support that and we don’t know how much overlap there is between the two groups,” she told Guardian Australia. 

“But what we do know is that when there is an increase in the cost of subsidised medicines, there are big decreases in the amount people spend on those medicines." 

It was true that making drugs more expensive led to some waste reduction, Kemp said. But this did not tell the full story because the use of important prescription drugs went down too. This was particularly the case for people with more than one condition who took multiple medicines, she said. 
They often stopped taking some when the price of drugs increased. 

“The recommendations are based on the assumption that people know enough about what their drugs do to make good, informed decisions about which drugs they can do without, but we know that’s not the case,” Kemp said.

 .................................. 

The drugs people were most likely to stop taking were those they didn’t immediately feel benefit from, Kemp said. 

“So they might stop taking their osteoporosis medication for strengthening their bones, because they won’t notice any difference – until they fall and get a broken hip. 

“You can either have a waste-proof system that is unaffordable [for patients], or an affordable system that is prone to waste, and our research found the government was heading too far towards the former." more

I was at the shops the other day. To look at me outwardly I look normal, and you'd not know the story of what was going on inside my body and mind. Old age pensioners are a different story. Many walk slowly with walking stick, bent over, bung legs, etc. They look old and frail. I was walking behind an old couple like this at the shops. Both husband and wife slowly hobbling along. And I thought to myself, "Abbott wants to make these people pay for something they need with money they haven't got." Such an illustration of pure cruelty.