CDDS goes down

ROBERT BURTON-BRADLEY

Working poor with HIV and other serious health conditions have been locked out of Medicare funded dental care after the federal government successfully closed the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme (CDDS).

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek (pictured) has repeatedly claimed the system is being rorted by dentists and that millionaires are using the non-means tested scheme.

Last week the Opposition, which opposed closing the CDDS, caved in and gave its support to a replacement scheme in the Lower House that will push low income cardholders into state dental care where waiting lists are in the hundreds of thousands.

Speaking on Channel Ten’s Meet The Press program last Sunday, Plibersek conceded the cuts were part of a push to get the budget back into surplus – a political commitment the government has been locked into since going into deficit during the global financial crisis.

Plibersek claimed that a payment of $515.3 million would help ease the pressure on state dental waiting lists till a new means-tested scheme begins in mid 2014.

“All I need from the states is their agreement that they will not reduce their effort in public dental. We can sign on the dotted line. The money can start flowing the first of December,” she said on the program.

“We are in negotiations with the states at the moment and I expect that we’ll get that agreement and that money can flow.”

NSW Health Lifestyles Minister Kevin Humphries said the CDDS should be reworked instead of shutdown and that the money was not enough to provide for the massive influx of patients once the CDDS was shut in December of this year.

“Rather than closing the scheme, the NSW Government considers that there are opportunities to revise the scheme, such as improving referral processes, clearer guidelines to ensure treatment is appropriate to patient need, greater use of the dental team beyond dentists, and improved monitoring and reporting,” he told the Star Observer.

“I have concerns around the public system’s capacity to provide adequate care without an alternate system in place.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said the new scheme would provide for children in families eligible for Family Tax Benefit A and to low income card holders.

Under current thresholds for low income health care cards a single person earning just $26,000 a year does not qualify while a childless couple must earn less than $43,836 a year to qualify, leaving hundreds of thousands of chronically ill people locked out of public dental care under the changes.

These people are also not eligible for state dental care.

A petition opposing the scrapping of the scheme had received more than 14,000 signatures this week.