Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 7:45:27 to 7:49:04
Discussion turns to the challenge of using historical data (2023-24) to set current prices. IHACPA acknowledges the pressure this puts on indexation accuracy and compares the process to established hospital sector pricing models.
Topics: Health, Government IT systems
Speakers: Senator The Hon Anne Ruston, Prof Michael Pervan, Mr Blair Comley, Unknown Speaker
So in terms of last year, I think it was I think the headline of last year was about 4.67, was it?
Yeah.
Um but that 4.67 actually translated into an increase in total an act funding of only something like three point whatever because of the change in the NWALS. Is that correct?
It's uh it's somewhat more complicated than that, yeah. But the So the average went up, but when it was applied to um the sector and it worked its way through the various ANAC levels, then yeah, it came out at slightly different number.
So yeah, yeah, your headline 4.67 was the amount of the increase on the base ANAC funding that took it up to whatever last year's price was. Yep. Um but if you actually calculated the increase in funding across the sector um of that uplift of of existing number of um of people in age care, it was significantly lower. Is that the case this time as well? So do what does the 2.55 relate to in terms of the overall additional um expenditure? Um what is the increase in expenditure that will relate to that um 2.55 once you've taken in the weightings into account?
Thank you, Senator. I don't have a number that I can um just provide you with. What I can say though is that we have done a lot of work to improve the model over last year, including um making sure that the indices that we use are more directly relevant to residential care. Uh and of course, you know, recognising that significant uplift that Fair Work Australia's given them over the last three years. So I would hope that the um the roll-out, if you like, of um RACPA in the coming year will be more moderate than last year. You won't see that sort of differentiation.
So what was the difference um between last year's index cost estimate and the subsequent reported actual costs?
Um sorry, Senator, when you say last year, do you mean 2526? Or I don't have that data yet. So the last year of complete data we've got would go to the first of October. It's 2324, yeah.
Not even 2425. Wow.
Make sure job really hard. Well, it it it means that there's a lot of pressure put on to make sure the the indexation is correct.
You can't really test that because if if we're not even testing, you know, like we've seen some pretty the numbers aren't always what the numbers appear to be.
Which is also why we use multiple indexes, I have to say. That's all that's all part of trying to make sure that we we give the most accurate price that we can.
Yeah. So um, yeah, that's pretty distressing that we're working on, and and as you rightly point out, with a with health care, you've got 40 years, so you can pretty confident you've got very little here, and you've barely got very little more, and you you're having to make some fairly significant recommendations about quite frankly the viability of the sector going forward.
Um we have the same issue in the public hospital health care as well. The last available year of data is a couple of years before, and then we have to index up from there.