Accessible and Affordable Healthcare
I’ve been out doorknocking on some lovely (and some not so lovely) winter’s days, and I’m hearing that some people here in the Hawkesbury are under pressure right now.
It’s the reason why I have continued to advocate for additional cost of living relief, and we are now starting to see some of the measures come into effect. Our aim is to ease the financial pressures on people, but also bring inflation down, as it is currently the key driver of interest rates.
One of the areas we’ve been able to reduce costs is with medicines.
From July, we froze the maximum cost of medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme so that no one will pay more than $31.60 for a PBS script. The one-year freeze on the co-payment for everyone with a Medicare card will extend to a five-year freeze for pensioners and other Commonwealth concession cardholders, so their costs will be capped at $7.70 for a PBS script.
Even before the latest freeze, residents in the Hawkesbury have been saving money on medicines. Across the electorate, residents have saved more than $1.7 million on their scripts with our earlier cheaper medicines policies and 60 day dispensing.
Our incentives to improve bulk-billing for GP visits by the under 16s and seniors – the two groups who most frequently visit the doctor – have also started to show results, with more than 84% of GP visits now being bulk billed, above the state and national average.
But we know there’s more to do to make sure access to health care in the Hawkesbury – at the GP, mental health and hospital level – is affordable. To that end, I was pleased to join the NSW Health Minister, Ryan Park, at his first visit to Hawkesbury Hospital as a public hospital, to discuss what opportunities there were for improving services.
Our tax cuts for every taxpayer, our energy relief for every household and our medicine freeze for every PBS script add to the cheaper childcare, fee-free TAFE and the biggest ever investment in bulk-billing.
And we’ll keep looking for ways that help people save money – like our quarterly price comparison of supermarkets – while at the same time help to tackle inflation.
