Labor ditches dental care causing chaos and pain
20th September, 2012
The Gillard Labor Government’s axing of the successful Medicare Chronic Disease Dental Scheme (CDDS) will leave hundreds of Wide Bay dental patients suffering from chronic disease without access to dental care, Federal Member for Wide Bay, Warren Truss warned today.“The closure of this billion dollar a year dental scheme will cause chaos, cost and pain to those who are already suffering. Patients who are in the process of receiving treatment under the Medicare scheme will find that their care will suddenly stop before it has been completed, leaving them in pain and with the additional expense of having to complete their treatment without Government assistance,” Mr Truss said.
“The Prime Minister says she is closing the scheme as a “savings measure”. She will close the CDDS on 30 November 2012 and replace it with an inferior, means tested program that will not commence until January 2014 for children, and 1 July 2014 for adults.
“The CDDS helped people with cancer and other chronic illnesses, whose teeth were affected by their illness, to access dental care. I am concerned that these patients could miss out on treatment during the gap between the closure of the Medicare scheme and the start of the Government’s program, adding to their distress and suffering.
“Under Labor’s scheme, children will have to wait 13 months before they can access a Federal Government supported scheme, and then they will only be eligible for $1,000 over two years, instead of up to $4,250 provided under the CDDS.
“Adults will have to wait at least 19 months for the new scheme and then they will go onto the public dental waiting list. The public waiting list will grow longer and longer due to increased treatment expectations and poor policy design.”
The cost of the Labor’s new dental program is expected to top $4 billion over four years, $2.7 billion for children and $1.3 billion for adults, but scheme is part of Labor’s $120 billion unfunded black hole. Both schemes are only scheduled to start well after the next election and stand to suffer the same fate as so many of Labor’s broken promises.
“Like so many of Labor’s grand ideas, its dental scheme is big on promise, short on detail, and without funding,” Mr Truss said.
“The CDDS, implemented by the former Coalition Government, is a proven scheme that has provided more than 20 million dental services to more than one million patients since 2007. If the Government had criticisms of the scheme they should have worked with the Coalition to improve it even further, rather than scrapping it for an unfunded, untested inferior scheme.
