GP Super Clinics: ludicrous “$450 per visit” claim left uncountered
May 24, 2011 – 2:37 pm, by Jeremy Sear  
If you relied on the News Ltd coverage of the Super Health Clinics data tabled in parliament last week, you might well have come out of it with the distinct (but dodgy) impression that the government was paying absolutely insane amounts of money for every visit:
[indent]
JULIA Gillard’s GP super clinics are under fire for bloating the standard cost of a visit to the doctor.

The standard cost has blown out by an estimated $450 a consultation.[/indent]

Really? Well, that’s what the Opposition claims:

Liberal MP Andrew Southcott, a former doctor, said a visit to a GP Super Clinic would always cost taxpayers more.

[indent]“After more than three years, the taxpayer contribution to a visit to a GP Super Clinic is more than $450 per visit on top of Medicare,” Mr Southcott said. “The cost to the taxpayer of a visit to a GP Super Clinic will always be higher than the cost of a visit to a local medical centre or family practice. They have the same Medicare cost structures except that with the GP Super Clinics the buildings have been taxpayer funded.”[/indent]

So how’d they come up with that figure?

[indent]But the Gillard Government has announced plans to build more, confirming they have already spent $127 million on capital works.

According to data tabled in Parliament in response to MPs’ questions, the GP Super Clinics provided 280,000 services as at the end of January, costing taxpayers an estimated $450 for each visit, on top of the standard Medicare fee.[/indent]

Oh, I see. In the same way as a month after you move into your new $400k house, it’s already cost you MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS A DAY.

Except of course it hasn’t, because the $400k cost is spread over the thirty or more years you live in it, minus the value when you sell it, and you’re not $10k a day worse off at all.

Likewise the cost “per visit” to these clinics now is not the total cost of the asset divided by the number of visits so far, given that those assets still exist and still have most of their value. The number of visits continues to increase whilst the $127 million was of course a one-off expense. And yet I don’t expect these papers are going to publish a story next year, after another 280,000 visits, saying how well the Government has done, miraculously HALVING the cost per visit, with the cost per visit continuing to fall, the geniuses.

Basically, the figure is misleading and, while I expect little more from the Opposition, which thinks its job is to throw misleading muck around and hope some of it sticks, I do expect the newspaper to treat its readers with a little respect and explain what’s wrong with that calculation – rather than trumpeting it in the headline and the lead-in text, with no qualification.

After 12 paragraphs bashing it without a sentence pointing out the counterargument to the Opposition’s claim, this is the only quote from the Government that got published:

[indent]A spokeswoman for Health Minister Nicola Roxon said: “The GP Super Clinics program is an investment in providing quality health services into the future.”[/indent]

Well, that in no way addresses the point. Is that really all they said?

Samantha Maiden tells Crikey that there was in fact a response from Ms Roxon’s office that did more specifically address the $450 figure, but it was cut, presumably for length.

We’re not alleging any kind of conspiracy here, but we’d suggest that the absence of that critical response seriously undermines the entire story, and leaves readers with a very inaccurate impression of the program and its costs. (That the inaccurate impression is a negative for the Government is, we’re sure, a coincidence.) Which part of the system broke down here, we have no idea – but we’d suggest there’s definitely a problem, and it deserves consideration by those at each step of the process, from the journalist, to the subeditor, to the editor. Someone decided that the other side’s response to the figure was not critical to the story: we think they were clearly wrong, and should be careful to make a different, a fairer, decision next time.

And it’s one further reason – in addition to the importance of not leaving a contentious statement hanging without response – for journalists to avoid leaving the counter-argument to the very end of their reports, where it’s liable to be the first thing cut.

Because the upshot of this uncorrected, unbalanced piece as published, is that readers of the News Ltd papers that ran it are left with a highly distorted view of reality on this subject. And that can’t be good for our national debate.

THE RIGHT represent overseas investors!