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Australia needs integrated health care

By Vern Hughes - posted Tuesday, 22 October 2002


Through the provision of health insurance products, members of participating organisations will be introduced to the concept of enhanced market purchasing power for consumers of health care, beginning with price and service arrangements for services not listed in the Medicare benefits schedule (dental, allied health, optical, non-PBS pharmacy items, some home-based care services) and services which are listed in the schedule but priced in excess of the scheduled fee.

Integrated Health Care would package these arrangements in various formats, develop preferred provider and practitioner arrangements, introduce billing and payment systems for episodes of care which are inclusive of various practitioner and service types. It would then develop information and health record systems which are transferable across practitioner and service types.

These activities are possible within present public policy settings. The integration of insurance and service delivery in the form of fully cost-conscious health care packages is dependent on a series of far-reaching policy changes. Integrated Health Care aims to create structural innovations whose enterprise operations and structural capacities create conditions which are favourable for and facilitate further public policy change and break the health care reform stalemate.

Advertisement

Our model and inspiration are drawn from the Group Health Co-operative in Seattle, the largest consumer-governed non-profit health care system in the United Sates. http://www.ghc.org/web/about_gh/index.jhtml

For further details, see http://www.sen.org.au/projects/1031058235_17220.html.

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About the Author

Vern Hughes is Secretary of the National Federation of Parents Families and Carers and Director of the Centre for Civil Society and has been Australia's leading advocate for civil society over a 20-year period. He has been a writer, practitioner and networker in social enterprise, church, community, disability and co-operative movements. He is a former Executive Officer of South Kingsville Health Services Co-operative (Australia's only community-owned primary health care centre), a former Director of Hotham Mission in the Uniting Church, the founder of the Social Entrepreneurs Network, and a former Director of the Co-operative Federation of Victoria. He is also a writer and columnist on civil society, social policy and political reform issues.

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