Medical, nursing and dental groups concerned about needs still not met in Budget
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) vice-president, Dr.Choong-Siew Yong, said that although the Government had identified key areas for health funding, “the funding in most cases was inadequate for long-term impact. New funding for indigenous health, aged care, combating obesity, rural health, dental care, chronic disease, and after-hours GP services was welcome but well short of what is needed to make a real difference”.
The president of the Doctors Reform Society, Dr.Tim Woodruff, said that “amongst the messages the Treasurer, Mr.Costello, delivered was the unspoken one to the hundreds of thousands of Australians waiting for admission to a public hospital bed. The message was ‘Just keep waiting’ – I’ve a fistful of dollars but I’ve better things to spend it on than you”.
“Why, in the face of successive huge budget surpluses, could the Treasurer not find some money for our needy and deserving hospitals? The best he could do was an expansion of an inadequate, inefficient ‘safety net’ for dental health with an initiative which will not reach most of the 650,000 people on public dental waiting lists”.
The Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) said the Federal Government “has sadly produced a budget that contains mediocre short term benefits which appear to be designed primarily to improve its chances of winning the next Federal election”.
The Australian Dental Association (ADA) was pleased with many measures in the budget because “more important than the dollars allocated they mark recognition and some willingness on the part of the Federal Government to assume a greater role in dental care delivery to Australians”.
But the ADA had “envisaged a greater role” and said “too many Australians with dental problems have been ignored and are the losers in this budget. The measures don’t go far enough for those Australians suffering disability”.
The ADA said that “sadly nothing has been done to remedy the shortfall in the numbers of dentists in the public sector” and it had been a “significant oversight” that Medicare had not been modified to include provision of prosthetic appliances”.
