Patients will suffer, and emergency and elective surgery waiting times will worsen as a result of Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to rip almost $5 billion out of public hospitals over the next four years.
The $2.9 billion promised by Mr Turnbull today is well short of the $7.9 billion in additional funding the Liberals committed to in the 2013 election, according to figures prepared by the Parliamentary Budget Office.
It’s also a drop in the ocean compared to the $57 billion the Coalition ripped from public hospital funding in its first Budget and the billions more cut from prevention, primary care and other areas of health that’s increasing pressure on Emergency Departments.
The Australian Medical Association’s Public Hospital Report Card 2016 shows that emergency department and elective surgery waiting times are already worsening as a result of these hospital cuts, and we know this will only get much worse when the full impact of these cuts comes into effect in 2017.
“Today’s agreement goes nowhere near meeting the long-term needs of the nation’s public hospitals, and falls dismally short of replacing the funding taken away from the States in the 2014 Federal Budget.”
AMA PRESIDENT PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER, 1 APRIL 2015
Malcolm Turnbull’s short term fix to get him through the election shows he doesn’t care about what’s been happening to our patients waiting in emergency departments, he doesn’t care about patients languishing on waiting lists for elective surgery and he doesn’t care about our doctors and nurses trying to do the best they can with less resources.