Hospitalisation rates for diabetes, tooth decay and other conditions that should be treatable or manageable out of hospital show how Australia’s health system is consistently failing some communities. Places such as Frankston and Broadmeadows in Victoria and Mount Isa and Palm Island in Queensland have had potentially preventable hospitalisation rates at least fifty percent above...

Ineffective management of heart disease, asthma, diabetes and other chronic diseases costs the Australian health system more than $320 million each year in avoidable hospital admissions. At best, the Australian primary care system provides only half the recommended care for many chronic conditions. Only a quarter of the nearly one million Australians diagnosed with type...

Calls for changes to ensure patients are protected from out-of-pocket charges and taxpayers get to share the savings from economies of scale and efficiency gains. Summary The government could save up to $175 million a year by changing the way it pays for pathology testing and negotiating a fairer share of efficiency savings with industry...

Overview In some hospitals, far too many people get a treatment they should not get, even when the evidence is clear that it is unnecessary or doesn’t work. Australia urgently needs a system to identify these outlier hospitals and make sure they are not putting patients at risk. To show how such a system could...

Overview: Poor implementation of a policy to get better value for PBS spending is costing government $320 million a year and raising questions about pharmaceutical industry involvement in drug pricing. The therapeutic group premium policy, introduced in 1998 to stop the government wasting money on over-priced drugs, has been so watered down that it is...