Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily Oz. It's Thursday, the tenth of October.
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Have you ever avoided a visit to the dentist because of how much it costs? Well, if you are sitting there nodding yes to that question, chances are you.
Are not alone.
According to a new report, one in two Aussie's without private health insurance has avoided the dentist due to high costs.
In today's deep dive.
We're going to explore what we learned from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's new report and what it means for the average Ozzie.
Before we get into it, though, Sam, what is making headlines. Former Labor senator Fatima Payman has announced she's launching a new political party called Australia's Four. Payman was elected as a Western Australian Labour senator at the last election and isn't up for reelection until twenty twenty eight. She quit Labor in July after she went against the party's position to support a motion calling for recognition of the state
of Palestine. Payman has since become a vocal critic of the Abanese government and sits as an independent in the Upper House. Payman said her new party will encourage the major parties to quote stop focusing on politics and get back to focusing on people.
Australia's top five universities have all slid down the World University Rankings list. That's apparently due to quote declining reputation and international outlook. The Times Higher Education University Rankings provide a yearly update on the position of global universities. This year's index shows Melbourne, Monash and Sydney Universities, alongside the Australian National University and the University of Queensland, have all
dropped down the list. Melbourne University he remains Australia's highest ranked position at thirty nine, down two spots from last year.
Brazil has lifted its ban on the social media platform X formerly known as Twitter, ending a five week long suspension in the South American country. Last month, Brazil's highest court, the Supreme Court, blocked X across the country of more than two hundred million people after X failed to comply with court orders asking to remove misinformation from its platform. The standoff led to direct intervention from X's owner Elon Musk, who described the move as censorship and called the judge
overseeing the case a dictator. X has now published a statement saying it's returning to Brazil after agreeing to comply with the court's orders to remove certain accounts peddling misinformation, and appointed a new Brazilian representative for the company and Today's Good News.
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists for their developments in machine learning, which helps AI models. John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton have researched neural networks. Those are nodes that process and learn information in a way that's inspired by the human brain. The scientists have then applied this type of thinking to machines, helping them learn and churn data that's in turn been picked up by
artificial intelligence systems. One of the scientists, who is also an ex Google employee, Professor Hinton, is sometimes referred to as the godfather of AI, and he's warned of the risk that machines could outsmart humans. Sam, it has been so long since we've done a podcast together.
I'm Sam. By the way, It's lovely to pleasure to meet.
You and run a business with you, but glad to be back on with you, especially to talk about something I'd say is probably a worst topic on earth to talk about. I only realized once we got into the room, how much you hate going to the dentist.
I really hate to be fulfilling stereotypes of dentist phobia. I don't mean to be critical of the dentistry profession, as we're going to talk about profession. It's very important. It takes a two week, a solid two week anxious build up to get me to the dentist. I had a lot of orthodontic work in my teen years, and I think there was just bad experiences there. Anyway, this is, yeah, probably the worst topic for me to come back to. Great to welcome back. Let's talk about how much this
delightful experience costs. Okay, so I mean now I'm head there.
The reason we're talking about it today is because of the cost. That's because the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recently released a new report. It was into the state of oral health and dental care here in Australia, and I think the big headline to come out was that it is just very expensive.
Are we spending a lot as a country on the dentist?
Yeah, I mean we're spending around eleven billion dollars as a country on dental services each year. But if you think about that, those are the people that are going to the dentist. And what I find interesting is the people who aren't going to the dentist and why they're not going to the dentist. So one in two Ozzies aged fifteen and over didn't visit the dentist in twenty
twenty two to twenty twenty three. And according to this report, around one in six people who needed to see a dentist either delayed or didn't go and see that dentist, and one in six said that was because of the cost associated with it.
Right, it is quite expensive to go to the dentist, especially if you do need something urgently done or there is a complexity to what you need. Yeah, exactly.
And as with you know, any kind of cost accessibility point, it does disproportionately impact some groups. So we know from this report that First Nations people were more likely to avoid the dentist due to cost than non indigenous Australians, So that number was about forty nine percent compared to thirty nine percent. And women were also more likely to avoid the dentist due to expenses than men. That one was around forty three percent compared to thirty five percent.
So there's this group of Australians that are avoiding the because of how much it costs. Within that group, there's a group who really need the dentists that are avoiding it because of how much it costs. Let's talk about private health insurance. What do we know about the group of Australians who have private health insurance.
Yeah, so, as we I guess would expect here, Australians without private health insurance are twice as likely to avoid the dentists because of cost compared to those with insurance. And I mean that can be for any number of reasons. If you are in a position to get private health insurance, you are likely to have access to more money in the first place, So there's quite a bit that goes
into that. But AIHW spokesperson doctor Adrian Webster said that even after private health insurance payments, out of pocket dental expenses still vary pretty significantly. So for example, the median out of pocket costs of a preventative service, So something like removing pluck or stains for patients with private health insurance, that could still range from zero to eighty two dollars.
So even with private health insurance, we're still getting a full kind of spectrum of cost here, and that's still after paying for private health insurance, creating some cost barriers for people.
So even amongst different groups of Australians, those with or without private health insurance, it does sound like quite a common experience to grapple with cost at the dentist.
Yeah, it is, and it was something you know, we uploaded this story to our Instagram, our TDA Instagram earlier this week and I was blown away by the engagement it got. There were people flooding our comments section, flooding our dms, telling us about their own experiences at this It really seems to have hit an.
A like earlier. I think we've gotten to the root of that one. Anyway, Sorry that was such a dad joke, but.
No, it was really something that was mirrored by our audience. You know, the things that we saw in that AIHW report seemed to be reflected among broader Australians, certainly among young Australia. We did a call out to our listeners to ask them about their own experiences when it comes to accessing gentle care. Here is what we heard from paid a TDA listener.
I put off going to the dentist for three years because the last time I went to the dentist they told me that I needed my wisdom teeth out, but they quoted me three thousand dollars for that, and every friend that I spoke to basically paid around the same or more for their wisdom teeth removals, which just scared me.
So I didn't go back until the infections and the pain was getting so bad that I got really desperate and googled, like, what's the most affordable way to do this, and found one dentist in Melbourne that basically they have cat pricing, so they will do wisdom teeth removal for a certain cat price under one thousand dollars, which was incredible.
I ended up going with that option, but it's just so out of reach most of the time, and I just know so many people that paid like five thousand dollars just for a simple thing like wisdom teeth removal like that should be covered on Medicare because a lot of adults need that to happen. And it's not like you can just leave your wisdom teeth in at the end.
There you can hear page referring to Medicare.
Well, I was going to ask about Medicare because immediately you just think, well, Medicare must cover the procedures that we all need. Yeah, and in that thinking you would be wrong. Well, that's interesting that it's not covered. Talk me through that.
So it's not everything, but the majority of dental services are not covered by Medicare. And just a quick reminder while we're talking about Medicare here, we're referring there to Australia's Universal Health Insurance Scheme and that is what guarantees that all Australians can access a range of health and hospital services at low or no cost. That's when we talk about bulk billing and all of those things. But yeah, as I said, those services mostly don't include dental services.
And I went into a bit of a deep dive as to why this.
Is the case.
And it turns out when GoF Whitlam, who was the Prime Minister who first began designing what we now know is Medicare, but at that point was Medibank. Turns out he did want to include dental but that due to a number of things, things like the cost of it and the fact that he was busy negotiating with doctors about including you know, their service, it just didn't get included at that point. And obviously that was decades and
decades ago. But in the years since, nothing's really changed and it remains mostly excluded today from the Medicare system.
Has it come up in Australian politics in the health policy arena in recent.
Years it has, and as recently as last month we had Health Minister Mark Butler talking about it. He was actually ruling out expanding Medicare support to include dental care. So he was asked about this, but you know, he rejected any calls to expand it. Instead, he was pointing to a Medicare scheme that gives children in eligible families access to one one hundred dollars of dental services every
two years. And that's why I was saying that not everything is excluded, because there are some kind of programs for children and for certain groups, but the majority are excluded. But he was saying about that program that only forty percent of eligible kids are using that service, and he said that the government's focused on actually lifting that number, not widening the pool people.
Who can actually access it.
So that's the government of the day who have obviously the power to change these things and whatever else. But then we've got the Greens, and I'd say they have been the loudest advocates in our political system for including dental in medicare.
I remember it coming up a lot last election.
Yeah, this has been I mean, it's nothing new for them. They've been talking about it for a while. The last election, like you mentioned, they committed to investing seventy seven billion dollars over the decade to provide free dental care. I presume that they'll probably take the same or a similar approach to the next election, given that nothing has really given in that time since you know, the last election.
And then if we look outside of politics and look at I guess industry stakeholders, we can see that the Consumer's Health Forum, which is an accessible healthcare advocacy body, they're actually also calling for the same thing. So after the AIH report was released, their CEO, doctor Elizabeth Devinie said that their needs to be a Medicare overhaul to improve the public dental system.
And she said, and.
I'm quoting here, we have adults in some parts of the country waiting five hundred or six hundred days to get in on the public dental system. This clearly isn't a universal system which provides for us all. So there she's calling for changes to the system itself.
It's a really interesting discussion, this one because of the universality of dental care, or at least an aspiring universality of dental care. But based on Mark Butler's comments you just told us about, doesn't sound like things are going to move very quickly anytime to no.
And I mean the accessibility of services of health services isn't unique to just dental. I mean, we've spoken on this pod so many times before about you know, GPS, and we know that Medicare of course covers visits to general practitioners, but that there still remain these big issues in being able to find gps who will bulk bill and being able to actually get into them. The same
of course with psychologists. And it seems like the government's really focusing their energies there, but that doesn't mean that, you know, dental and accessibility to dental is an issue that's going away, so definitely one to keep an eye on.
It's great to sink our teeth into that one. Zarah. Great to be back on the podcast as well, and thank you for joining us on the Daily Ods this morning. If you're listening to this podcast and you like what we do, it really means a lot when you support us. You can follow or subscribe if you're on Spotify or Apple, and if you're on YouTube, we'd love you to subscribe to our channel as well. We'll be back again with another episode tomorrow. Until then, go see the dentist and have a good day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalguton woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigol people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
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