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...

This paper recommends more public discussion, including an education campaign, about the limits of health care as death approaches and the need to focus on end-of-life care. Overview This report is about how, where and with whom we die. The baby boomers are growing old, and in the next 25 years the number of Australians...

There is an old joke about one fish asking another about the state of the water and the other answering “what’s water?” When you’re immersed in something and that is your daily experience, you are not able to step outside it – all you see is what you know. But with all the talk about...