Stephen Duckett
speaker
921 appearances
12 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2006
last heard May 2019
Stephen Duckett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, uh some of it goes on dental care, uh very very high proportion of out of pockets for dental, uh that's uh not covered by Medicare obviously, but also a significant proportion on out of pockets for specialist medical care, out of pockets for private uh hospital care.
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Well I think there are a range of reasons why why we're paying too much, but paying especially paying too much uh out of pocket.
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One of them is just supply and demand.
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In particular parts of Australia, uh we there are fewer specialists and so they're able to charge more.
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Uh ACT is an example, rural and regional Australia generally is an example of that.
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How do you define being paid too much?
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I mean nobody ever complained about being to pay too much.
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Well it's uh the way I phrased it was about out of pocket costs and th so we're paying way above the uh the Medicare rebate.
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Uh you th you might argue in some circumstances the Medicare rebate is too low.
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You could also argue in other circumstances, such as cataract operations, the Medicare rebate is too high.
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But I think uh the the fact is that consumers are paying these significant amounts and more importantly, Norman, uh
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Uh in the case of s medical specialists, for example, eight percent of uh Australians reported that they deferred seeing a medical specialist because of cost.
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Well, uh private health insurance uh has been by and large large stable in terms of the total number of people with health insurance.
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But what's been happening is the composition of health insurance has changed.
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So now almost everybody who has health insurance has some sort of deductible, that is, they have to pay the first five hundred or a thousand or two thousand dollars.
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And a significantly an increasing proportion.
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have some sort of exclusion.
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That is, they might not be covered for orthopaedic services, for example.
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The combination of those is that they're getting sticker shock, they're getting bills when they go to a private hospital and so the next time or when they ask a their surgeon how much will I have to pay myself out of pocket, they're saying, Whoops, I'm not g I'm just not just can't afford that and I'm not going to use the private hospital in these circumstances.
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That's right.
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Showing 361–380 of 921 · page 19 of 47
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