Pharmacy Daily | PBS co-payment must go lower

LOWERING the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) general co-payment from $42.50 to $30 is a welcome move, but further cuts are needed, Pharmacy Guild of Australia National President, Trent Twomey, believes.

Speaking at the Guild's annual Parliamentary Dinner in Canberra last night, Twomey reiterated the organisation's call for the general co-payment to be reduced to $19.

"I did not do five years of tertiary education to have a conversation [with a patient] about which medicine they have to delay, which medicine they have to defer, or which medicine they have to go without," he said.

"[But] the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said in the year before the [COVID-19] pandemic over 900,000 Australians had to delay, defer or go without their essential medicines.

"These people, the 900,000 identified by the ABS, are not the seven million Australians who have the concession card.

"They're the working poor, they're Australians who are not wealthy enough to have a disposable income, but not poor enough to be on some form of social security benefit.

"To fully address the 900,000 Australians, to get that figure down to zero, the general co-payment needs to go further still, it needs to go from $30 to $19.

"I know the very real financial pressures that our Federal Budget is under, and we know this can be done, and can be done in a cost neutral way to the Commonwealth purse that does not adversely effect the viability of Australia's 6,000 pharmacies."

Twomey added that the pharmacy sector was "not exempt from the workforce challenges that many other professions are also facing".

"But where others say they are at capacity and can do no more, we are here with an arm extended in partnership to say, 'we can do more, we can do more to not only keep Australians healthy and productive and out of hospital, we can do more to save the Federal purse money'," he said.

"We can do more to address the some 670,000 potentially preventable hospital presentations that are clogging up our emergency departments each and every year."