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| MENTAL health costs are soaring at four times original estimates but it is the well-off who are getting easily the most out of Medicare-financed services, a federal report shows. The report, to be released today, shows that high-income earners are nearly three times more likely to get Medicare-financed care from doctors and psychologists than low-income Australians. The rarely documented insight into how the Medicare fee-for-service system favours the well-off is expected to spur a government rethink of the Medicare-financed inequity, given mental illness is more likely to fall hardest on the young and poor. More than half of Australians suffering disorders, such as anxiety and depression, still go without treatment despite a dramatic rise, by up to 500,000 patients a year, since Medicare payments for mental health services were expanded five years ago. The Mental Health Minister, Mark Butler, said the report's findings ''reinforce the need for targeted programs to deliver services to hard-to-reach groups including young people, those in rural and remote Australia and in socio-economically disadvantaged areas''. The need was for a balanced approach that included no- or low-charge services by doctors and psychologists for patients who did not typically go to fee-for-service practitioners. Mr Butler said that too often the clinical psychologists and psychiatrists best equipped to deal with serious mental illness were in the inner suburbs of capital cities far away from many patients in most need. The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has pledged that a boost to mental health services will be part of Labor's second-term agenda. Mr Butler said he could not comment on whether mental health changes would be funded in the May 10 federal budget. The report found that in 2009 nearly 300,000 patients from the top income group received $146 million in Medicare-financed mental health services, while half that number in the lowest income group accessed $54 million in services. Mr Butler said treatment rates for those with mental health disorders have risen from 35 per cent in 2007 to 46 per cent last year after the introduction of the Medicare Better Access program. The program was initially projected to cost $540 million over four years but after huge growth in services it cost the taxpayer $515 million in the financial year 2009-10. Mr Butler said the comprehensive evaluation of the scheme undertaken by several expert panels had found Better Access was providing value for money for those it reached. Patients experienced ''clinically significant reductions'' in psychological distress after treatment. A member of the government's expert advisory group on mental health, Professor Ian Hickie, said the report underlined the need to redirect funding to no- or low-cost mental health services in low socio-economic areas, in outer suburbs and in regional towns. ''This program currently misses the target and yet this is the most expensive program ever rolled out and it is going to continue to chew up money that should be spent where it is most needed,'' he said. |
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