Country Profile: Australia

Population 20,000,000 (primarily urban)

Form of Government Parliamentary democracy

Economic System Capitalist

Health Care Model National Health Insurance (Medicare)

GDP $890B

% GDP spent on health care 9.7

Per capita income $38,420 (2006, adj US $)

Health care expense per capita $3,528

Health care expense per capita normalized to income of 50K $4,591

Life expectancy (m/f) 79/84 (as of 2006)

Healthy life expectancy (m/f) 71/74

Overview

• Goals: Equity, efficiency, and quality
• Tax funded
• Ready access
• Generally cost-effective, good outcomes
• High level of public support
• Concerns about long-term sustainability due to rising costs
• Disagreements about funding and accountability between national and state governments
• Waiting lists for elective surgery
• Disparities in urban and rural care
• Continuing poor health of indigenous population

Structure

The Australian health care system is a mix of public funding and public and private care. The national government's role is limited to funding and formulating health policy on a population basis. States provide additional funding, provide public hospitals, and have great authority in administration of health policy. Localities are primarily concerned with providing environmental health services. The private sector supplies the majority of general practitioners and specialists, a number of private hospitals, diagnostic services, and supplemental insurance.

Because of the division-of-power structure of Australia's democracy, the national government and the state governments must achieve consensus in matters of health policy. (Australia has six states.) Clinical practice is largely self-regulated, although licensing and accreditation is required of most providers.

Financing
The public-private financing breakdown is two-thirds/one-third, with the national government paying nearly half of health costs, collected through general taxation and a mandatory Medicare levy of 1.5% of personal income. The majority of consumer expense is for uncovered pharmaceuticals.

Delivery

Treatment is largely free and unlimited, although public hospital services are prioritized. Two-thirds of Australia's doctors are general practitioners in private practice; in addition to providing primary and preventive care, these doctors perform minor surgery and serve as referral gatekeepers to the rest of the health care system.

70% of the hospitals that provide secondary and tertiary care are public. Combined with cost pressures, improvements in surgical technique and patient management has reduced the average length of stay in recent years. The chief complaint about Australian secondary care is about lengthy waits for elective surgery, a function of the prioritization of services.

Australia's national and state governments have combined to deliver a robust public health program that has had notable success in reducing coronary disease, the AIDS/HIV infection rate, cigarette smoking, and the mortality rate from traffic accidents. Australians enjoy a high level of immunization vaccination that has reduced the level of infectious disease, although not entirely.

Challenges
As with virtually all developed nations, Australia's health care system faces financial pressure brought about by budget constraints and medical inflation. Health care services in Australia are not well integrated, and debate is ongoing regarding the proper balance of public and private insurance. The health inequalities experienced by indigenous Australians are so protracted and severe that the World Health Organization calls them "intractable."

Overall
Australia has three basic goals for its health-care system: Equity, efficiency, and quality. Progressive taxation protects equity, although there are concerns that a two-tier system could develop. The mixed national-state governance compromises efficiency and also renders reform difficult. In recent years, quality has emphasized measurement of health outcomes, which have improved as reflected in Australia's long life expectancy.

WHO ranking 32 (US 37)

Click here to learn more about Australia's health care system.

The National Health Insurance Model

The National Health Insurance model places a foot in both the Bismarck and Beveridge camps. Like the Bismarck Model, it is insurance-based; like Beveridge, it is single payer. The most familiar application of National Health Insurance to Americans is Medicare: Employer-employee contributions are used by the federal government as an insurance fund. The government in turn pays private providers. That's the essence of the NHI model.

Because the government is the sole payer, it can exert tremendous bargaining influence on the prices of medical services and drugs. That's why Canada -- whose Medicare system is the most well-known version of NHI -- has cheap drug prices that lure Americans north of the border even though it is illegal to purchase prescription medication abroad. NHI countries generally control costs by limiting the services they will pay for and by limiting the availability of certain services, thus creating the lengthy waits for non-acute secondary care.

Therein lies the essential tradeoffs of the NHI model; to achieve universal coverage with cost controls, the government

• strongly influences prices and therefore provider compensation
• limits the services covered by the national insurance
• limits the volume of selected services and procedures

Besides Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan have adopted the National Health Insurance model.

The Big Four

The nations of the world have coalesced around four approaches to delivering health care:

• The Beveridge Model, wherein the government owns and operates health care. Cuba, England, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, and the four Scandinavian countries all provide health care via the this model, which is named for the British reformer who designed the parameters of Britain's welfare state. Beveridge Model systems are characterized by their commitment to public health and primary care, as well as efficiency. Also known as single payer, the Beveridge Model is the embodiment of socialized medicine
• The Bismarck Model, wherein all residents of a country are required to have health insurance and insurance companies are required to sell it to them. France, Germany, and Switzerland and most countries of western Europe operate under this model (as does Japan), named for the German chancellor who designed it in the 19th Century. Insurance can be profit, non-profit, or both (depending on the country); individual or employer driven. In any case, the insurance and health systems of Bismarck countries are tightly regulated. Bismarck Model nations often have advanced systems of health information technology.
• The National Health Insurance Model, wherein each resident pays into a government run insurance program that compensates private-sector providers. As the sole insurer, the government has a powerful negotiating role with providers and pharmaceuticals. Canada, Taiwan, and South Korea provide national health insurance.
• The Out-of-Pocket Model, wherein access to health care depends on the individual ability to pay. All undeveloped, non-industrialized countries must resort to this approach, as they have neither the resources nor the infrastructure to adopt the Beveridge, Bismarck, or NHI models.

As you can tell, the United States has a bit of all four. VA health care is government-owned and -operated (Beveridge); most Americans get insurance through employment and will soon have it mandated (Bismarck); most Americans pay into Medicare (NHI); and the uninsured and underinsured look to their own devices (Out-of-Pocket).

HealthMatters will examine each of the first three models, covering their implementations in different countries and pointing out the tradeoffs that each country makes.