Health Expenditure Australia 2004/05

Key dental extracts from the new Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publication Health Expenditure Australia 2004/05 include:

"Private health insurance funding of $5.7 billion in 2004–05 was mainly spent on private hospitals (48%), dental services (12%), administration (10%) and medical services (10%)".

"In 2004–05, out–of-pocket recurrent expenditure by individuals on health goods and services was an estimated $16.9 billion: $4.7 billion (28%) was spent on medications; $3.4 billion (20%) on dental services and $3.0 billion (18%) on aids and appliances".

"Most of the increase in recurrent expenditure was in the following six areas:
• hospitals—up $2.3 billion (31.0% of the overall increase in recurrent expenditure)
• medical services—up $1.7 billion (22.8%)
• aids and appliances—up $0.8 billion (10.3%)
• medications—up $0.6 billion (8.0%)
• high-level residential care—up $0.5 billion (6.9%)
• dental services —up $0.5 billion (6.1%)."

"Individuals funded 67.1% of the $5.1 billion spent on dental services in 2004–05. For the period 1994–95 to 2004–05, real growth in dental services expenditure averaged 3.7% per year—1.4 percentage points below the annual real growth in total recurrent health expenditure. However, in nominal terms, average annual growth for dental services expenditure was 8.8% over the decade, 0.5 percentage points higher than the growth for total recurrent health expenditure of 8.3%. The reason for the difference is the high growth in dental prices. In contrast, for the period 1997–98 to 2002–03, real growth for dental services (6.2% annually) exceeded that for recurrent health expenditure by 0.7 percentage points."