The falling growth in the use of private hospitals in Australia

Abstract

Australia has a rich public-private mix of financing and provision of healthcare. Since mid-2015, the higher growth in out of pocket costs relative to the growth in wages began to reduce the affordability of private healthcare and marked the start of the drop in private health insurance coverage. Using publicly available data, this paper describes the decline in growth in the utilisation of private hospital care before and after 2015. Growth in the use of elective surgery in private hospitals fell with some indication of increased waiting times in public hospitals, and evidence of doctors spending more of their time in public hospitals rather than in private practice. Private hospitals’ prof..