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Butler outlines details of latest medicine pledge
The health minister, Mark Butler, just spoke with ABC RN about Labor’s pledge to reduce the price of PBS-listed medicines to no more than $25 a script.
We need software arrangements and the like. And the important thing is, we’re delivering cheaper medicines this year. We’ve frozen the price of medicines for this year … Cheaper medicines is not just good for the hip pocket of household budgets, it’s really good health policy, because cheaper scripts are far more likely to be filled.
People are getting smashed everywhere they go with [the] cost of living, and health is a big, big part of that. The Greens have long been calling for relief to be given for people in health … We would really like to see dental into Medicare. That would have been a great thing for the government to do, and they still could do it in the budget next week. But as far as this announcement goes, it will provide much needed relief to millions of Australians.
If people are worried about the expenditure, the way to fix that and balance the budget is to make big corporations and ultra-wealthy billionaires pay their fair share of tax. And then we could do a lot of the good things, like putting dental into Medicare.
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