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GP Super Clinics will not lower health costs or take the pressure off hospitals, as the government has promised.
In the second of a pair of papers looking at the sustainability of Medicare in an ageing Australia, the Centre for Independent Studies today released The False Promise of GP Super Clinics, Part 2: Coordinated Care. The report’s author Dr Jeremy Sammut examines the evidence for the Rudd government’s plan to use GP Super Clinics to boost prevention of chronic disease and ‘take the pressure off public hospitals’ by ‘coordinating’ the primary care for the chronically ill. Sammut has found that the evidence does not support the government’s claims.
Coordinated care involves a GP or nurse monitoring the condition and managing the care of the chronically ill to ensure they receive all care available from a variety of allied health providers. The claim is that coordinated care will keep the chronically ill out of hospital and save on health costs.
Sammut says that “local and international evidence shows that coordinated care programs do not reduce hospital admissions, instead they uncover new cases requiring hospital-based treatment.”
“Super Clinics will therefore be likely to increase the pressure on struggling public hospitals, and accentuate, not alleviate, the challenges facing the health system as the population ages.”
Super Clinics mean an expansion of Medicare beyond traditional fee-for-service GP primary care to a range of wellness-promoting services—from dieticians to physiotherapists and psychologists.
“The evidence that the government’s promises about this policy are unrealistic has been ignored and misrepresented.”
The real agenda of the advocates of GP Super Clinics is to allow the allied health sector to become Medicare funded and provide Australia’s ageing baby boomers an opportunity to transfer the cost of loosening their stiff backs and soothing their sore feet onto the taxpayers of Generations X and Y.
“The richest pickings for the allied health sector lie in providing services to elderly Australians, who will want to access a wider range of health services (especially if they are ‘free’ under Medicare) to improve the quality of their lifestyle. In an ageing Australia, the creaky joints, rather than the squeaky wheels, will get the grease,” says Sammut.
If the Super Clinics are intended to relieve rather pressure on hospitals, the Rudd government should be aiming to shift as many hospital-based services as possible into community-based facilities to better manage the cost of demand for hospital services.
The report is available online at https://www.cis.org.au/policy_monographs/pm85.pdf
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
He is available for comment.
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The False Promise of GP Super Clinics, Part 1: Preventive Care