Last week, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which aimed to reduce the cost of the program to $55 billion per year by the end of the year.
Under the proposed changes, it is expected that $22 billion will be saved across the forward estimates, avoiding what would have otherwise been a $13 billion blow-out over the previously projected spend on the program.
Butler stated in an address to the National Press Club, that a “diagnosis gateway has funnelled people onto a scheme that was never designed for them” and that standardised assessments of functional capability would be used to determine eligibility for the NDIS instead of basing support on diagnosis alone.
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