Impact of Medicare Payment Reductions †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Impact of Medicare Payment Reductions. Answer: Introduction The focus of the following paper is to describe about the policy that the Australian government has taken about certain areas they have to take care of. The Government has the responsibility of taking care of all the people living in the country. Especially, the government has the responsibility of taking care of the health issues of the common Australians. The health issues in every country os treated issues so the healthcare has been chosen in this paper to be highlighted positively. The health issues have been developing in almost all the countries because of the poor conditions in health and hygienic issues. The different policies regarding healthcare will be scrutinized in this paper and a proper analysis would be made in order to bring out all the positive and negative points. The Australian Government has also made some policies that would indeed benefit the marginalized and vulnerable people in the country known as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people. As they bel ong to the indigenous culture, they need the help of the government to have better healthcare facilities. It is to be noted that healthcare is provided by both the government and private organizations in the country. The impact of these policies will be analyzed with the mission of rendering these policies. The way of implementing these policies would be discussed and the organizations that will execute these policies would be highlighted here as well. The health policies taken up by the Australian government would be discussed in this section. The healthcare system is provided in Australia by both the private and the government organizations. The Government looks after the national health policy and they also take care of the operational procedures of the hospital (Australia.gov.au, 2018). The different state governments make the operations by themselves and this helps them to understand the difficulties that arise while running the organizations. The Government has introduced a publicly funded healthcare system named Medicare (Australia.gov.au, 2018). This system can exist together with the private health system of the country as well. Primary health and well being of the people The Government is responsible for providing the necessary facilities for the health and well-being of the common people of the country. All the states and the territories have the responsibility of providing these health facilities to the people. They have to serve the common people in the public hospitals and communities in different states and territories. They also look after the public health, ambulance services, services for the dental problems of the public and all the mental health programs as well. They also work very hard to make the links between the state and territory health services (Australia.gov.au, 2018). This Government body looks after all the issues in the healthcare sector that can arise for the negligence of the workers. They see to the improvements in the national periphery of the health facilities. They ensure the fact of keeping up to the national safety and clinical standards. The Government bodies are responsible for looking after all the safety of the healthcare system. There is a national agency for the health and welfare statistics and information in the country. They provide the best quality services in healthcare, notes all the issues and challenges in the system, the problems in budget and expenditure, quality of the hospitals in the public territory. The national agency has the task of ensuring the solutions to the problems like mental health and ageing, disability of the older people, protecting the children and many others. The medical services in the country are properly looked after by the Government. They have many wings that look after the several issues in the healthcare sector. Australian Digital Health Strategy The Australian Digital Health Strategy requires the help seekers to get free consultation from the doctors on several issues. The patients can consult with the doctors online and get best advices in a safe and secure way. This modern policy was developed to match the present needs of the stakeholders. This policy has been implemented in the country to cater to the needs of the modern scenario. It has been noted that many people are unable to consult with the doctors physically as they do not get the ample time to visit them (Aph.gov.au, 2018). The patients can register here and get the best suggestions from the qualified doctors to bring a remedy to their problems. This would be very much beneficial from the clinical and economical benefits as well. The patients can share their medical records with the doctors as it is completely secure platform. They will get the best solutions in this case. Medicare policy is considered to be one of the best policies in the Australian healthcare background. The Medicare benefits are provided to all the common people in the country that would be very much effective as well. The important things that the Medicare policy gives are the different kinds of medical services for free to the needy people or at a lower cost. This includes the services of doctors, specialists of different diseases, optometrists, dentists and other medical care providers as well (Aph.gov.au, 2018). The common people can avail prescriptions at a lower cost and the benefit of the free care as the public patient in all the public hospitals across the states and territories. The patients can avail a 75% discount on certain cases irrespective of being a private or public patient. All the people can have a clear access to the Medicare services if they are registered in Medicare. It is noted that the medicines have become very costly in the current times. This is why the Government has found out the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme that would cut down the costs of the medicines in the best ways and help the needy patients. If the patients can manage to hold a concession card, they can also get the medicines at further lower rate indeed. Private Health insurance Some patients who are eligible for availing the services of the Australian Government rebate on Private Health insurance. The amount of the rebate will depend on the age of the oldest person in the family and the amount of money they earn per annum (Donato Segal, 2013). This is why the patients need to show their annual income to the hospital authorities to get the coverage of this rebate (Cassidy, 2015). The other requirements for this are the facts that the all people who are to be covered in this rebate should have the eligibility of holding the Medicare Card. Then only they can avail the rebate services. The annual family income should also be within the limits (Wade, Soar Gray, 2014). The main background of implementing this policy is to confirm that these facilities can reach to all the common people across the country irrespective of the caste, creed, skin color, religion and all other facts. The cross-cultural conflicts are dealt with serious implications in this factor. All the patients should be dealt and treated with same measurements. The Government is of the opinion that no patients should be deprived of the policies implied by the government. The government wanted to provide all the facilities even to the people from the lower income families (Wade, Soar Gray, 2014). This is why they will need to assess all the factors in the section and evaluate what they needed to do if they wanted all the people to get the best quality medical facilities. The Labor Government in the year 1984. The arrangements regarding finance had been cancelled because renewed later on. This policy was implanted through the Health Legislation Amendment Act 1983 (Aph.gov.au, 2018). T he bulk billing had been restored in this format of Medicare. This is why the Medicare was implemented to save the common Australians from the grasp of huge payments. This policy can be implemented all over the country since it engages the common benefit of all the people (Lee et al., 2012). The main objective of this policy is to provide the best medical facilities to all the patients irrespective of their social and economic position. This policy will help the people to get their medication and treatment at a lesser expenditure (Boxall Gillespie, 2013). The Medicare policy is supposed to be one of the best healthcare policies in the world. This policy takes care about millions of people living in Australia (Donato Segal, 2013). This policy provides free healthcare to many people in Australia. This is why they can avail the doctors consultation, diagnosis tests, accommodations in hospitals and other facilities under single payment. The eye tests can be covered in this policy as well (Hartmann et al., 2012). The patients can also avail the treatment from the favorite doctor of his choice by getting admitted as a private patient. Then also the patients can take the benefits of the hospital accommodations and other issues. They can get the medicines at a lesser amount as well (Page et al., 2015) The medicine costs are reduced if the patients can avail from the concession cards of the Medicare Policy. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) has been another scheme for the implementation of this policy in the best ways (Duckett et al., 2013). The members of Medicare can buy all the medicines at a lower cost if they use their cards. The patients can get the private health insurance by the Australian health insurers who have been registered. This saves all the extra expenses for the patients (Oshima Emanuel, 2013). The facilities that are given to the common people in Australia are not utilized by the people of the high socioeconomic status. The private health insurance schemes also come to the aid of the common people by providing some discounts. This is much faster in its implementation process. There are many criterions that have to be fulfilled by the citizen of Australia. Only they will be able to take part in the Medicare policy. If these criterions are not fulfilled the citizens would not get those benefits of Medicare policy (Mellish et al., 2015). Implementation of this policy This policy can be implemented in various ways. The government organizations collect all the relevant data about the people belonging to different socioeconomic classes. Then they can put them in different categories and they can provide them with the utmost care at lower costs (Peasah et al., 2013). This is a complete cost effective policy indeed that looks after the well being of the common people. The government implements this policy for all the people who deserve to be in these categories. This policy can be implemented on several people as they fulfill these criterions. This is a completely subsidized facility provided by the Federal Government of Australia (Peasah et al., 2013). The funding of these facilities for the patients from the different social backgrounds are provided by the Federal Government of Australia and the different state and territorial governments. The Australian Healthcare Agreements are the most important reasons for this. Many dental services are also pro vided in this as well. (Greysen et al., 2015). The healthcare system has been greatly improvised in order to provide the best facilities to the commoners in the country. The various programs have been chalked out regarding this policy. The patients can get many rebates and discounts on the rates of medicine and other costs like hospital accommodations. As the public hospitals are owned by the state and territory governments they will require the proper funding. The fundings are arranged with the help of the Federal Government and they can provide their services to various areas like dental care of the patients, providing the benefits of these services in the private hospitals as well (White Wu, 2014). These programs include the selling of costly medicines at a lower rate. Thus the patients are very much benefitted as well. Such programs like the Safety Net Arrangements would be implemented to see if all the patients can avail these services and they do not have to pay the extra charges to the hospitals. It has been also noted th at the Medicare policy pays around 80% of the out-of-hospital Medicare charges for the patients. This is done on the base of the Commonwealth Concession. These are the very reasons as to why the Medicare policy has been so much popular in the country. The Medicare Plus Safety Net program has been taken as one of the main programs regarding this policy (Wu Shen, 2014). Organizations managing the program The government healthcare organizations always manage this program. The health department of Australia is the main people behind implementing this program (Crettenden et al., 2014). The various issues like the cost effectiveness of this program and the funding issues are handled and managed by the Federal Government of Australia and the state and territory governments (Krger Yeandle, 2013). This is the very reason that the patients get so many benefits as have been mentioned above. The gap payments are also paid by the government to cut down the burden of costs on the people. Medicare has been reflected as a very strong medical insurance policy that has helped many people in Australia (Krger Yeandle, 2013) This is why it can be said that it has a very sustainable future. As the common patients are benefited they will definitely go with the present Government and it is the responsibility of the government to provide the best facilities for a long time (Pawar, 2014). The government wants to ensure the best service quality to serve the patients. This is why the government will have to increase the salaries of the workers so they can work effectively. The budget allocations will have to be distributed properly. This will be helpful for sustaining the entire policy for a long time. Conclusion This paper can be concluded by saying that the healthcare policy has been one of the most important policies to cater to the well being of thee society. This is why the Government had come up with this Medicare policy in year 1984. This policy has been greatly discussed in this paper along with a brief overview of it. All the important aspects and guidelines of this policy have been highlighted. Apart from these things, the positive and negative issues in this policy have been found out as well. The main objective of implementing this policy has been described as well. The ways of implementing this policy has been discussed along with certain practical implications. The ways to keep the sustainability of this policy are discussed to get the best ideas. Another thing that has been discussed is the background of the policy. This is a very interesting policy and this policy has been providing the best services to the common people always. References Aph.gov.au (2018).Medicare - Background Brief Parliament of Australia. [online] Aph.gov.au. Available at: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/archive/medicare [Accessed 12 Apr. 2018]. Australia.gov.au (2018).Medical services | australia.gov.au. [online] Australia.gov.au. 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