Ageing - will the real culprit please stand up?

Despite this, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, spending on public health initiatives currently amount to around 2 per cent of total Government health expenditure and over the past few years, Government funding for public health research has declined in the order of around 21 per cent.

We should also realise that cutting funding of essential services may only exacerbate the problem in the long run. If we want the majority of people to enter old age as healthy as possible, then making it harder and more expensive to access quality health care – especially for low income earners who are most vulnerable to poor health – is hardly going to achieve that end.

Increasing co-payments for drugs may mean that those on low incomes will be the least likely to take advantage of whatever benefits may be available from medication. They may choose not to visit the doctor or fill their prescriptions. A recent cross-national study found that almost one in five Australians reported not filling a prescription in the past year due to cost. But this is the group who need it most because the other circumstances of their lives increase the risk of poor health in old age.

The biggest lesson from the Intergenerational Report, however, is that we should stop trying to hide serious Governmental mismanagement and lack of vision behind scare-mongering about a crisis – ageing – that isn’t really there. Instead, we should begin with an accurate and forward thinking analysis of the real problems that we will face in the future.