A new report claims that Australia’s ageing population is placing increasing strains on Australia’s health system. From SBS News:
Australia’s ageing population is driving up hospitalisation rates while health practitioners are witnessing a dramatic rise in vaccine-preventable influenza cases in hospitals.
The latest Admitted Patient Care 2017-18 report, released on Thursday, showed 60 per cent of the 11.3 million admissions to hospital in 2017-18 were to the public system.
Publicly funded admissions, over the last five years, have grown at 4.7 per cent per year on average while admissions paid by private insurance grew at an average of 3.6 per cent per year.
The total number of hospital visits grew by about 3.8 per cent each year over that period.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report says older Australians were a “key driver” of the growth…
We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that Labor’s disastrous policy of unlimited elderly parental visas will not come into effect. This policy could have added potentially millions of new elderly residents to Australia’s population and dramatically increased pressures on the health and aged care systems.
That said, we will still have to contend with the Coalition’s 15,000 capped scheme, which is less egregious. Be grateful for small mercies.
