Last Friday while eating breakfast I noticed what I thought was a piece of cereal lodged in my gum. After extricating it with my tongue I immediately realised it was a filling that had come out of my tooth.
I booked a dentist appointment for later that day.
This alone sets me apart from many Australians. When the ABS last surveyed our ability to access to healthcare across the 2024-25 financial year, a quarter of people said they put off seeing a dentist even when they needed to.
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Whereas the tendency to put off going to the GP is consistent across levels of socioeconomic disadvantage (which measures things such as income, employment status and skill levels), the tendency to avoid the dentist is very much linked to disadvantage.
That’s because nearly two-thirds of people put off seeing a dentist due to reasons of cost, whereas cost is a factor for only 29% of people when deciding to put off seeing a GP:
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My new filling set me back $237, even after private health insurance (and yes I know I am stupid – after all I wrote the column “Private health insurance is a dud”).
Little wonder that 14% of Australians don’t just put off seeing a dentist but they end up not going at all – compared with just 1% of people when it comes to the GP:
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As I paid the bill, not for the first time did I realise how fortunate I was to be able to do so but also just how screwed the debate over the budget is.
Think about it – in one of the richest countries in the world, 29% of people put off seeing a GP due to cost and nearly two-thirds did so for the dentist. And that is just taken as a given.
It does not result in front-page stories of families going without other necessities due to medical costs – or going without medical care altogether because they simply can’t afford it.
The fact is that we could have dental in Medicare – the Parliamentary Budget Office has estimated it would cost about $13.6bn this financial year. (For comparison, we know that a tax on gas exports would raise around $17bn a year.)
But the government has chosen not to do it. No one in the LNP or One Nation cares to suggest the government should choose to do it. And almost no Australian media commentators would bother to push it.
Similarly, the biggest cut in the budget was to the NDIS – essentially an 11% cut in real terms:
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But no one in the LNP, and few in the media, seem to care too much about this – instead it is largely taken as a necessary cut.
On the floor of parliament, the distorted priorities have also been clear. Rather than ask about how, as we reported last week, those with Down syndrome will be among the most affected by cuts to NDIS services, the opposition has instead tried to suggest the biggest issue for people with Down syndrome is testamentary discretionary trusts.
It echoes this grossly misleading article headlined: “Families of disabled children forced to overhaul finances under new Labor tax reforms”. In reality, special disability trusts were specifically exempted from the changes to trusts. Nothing has changed for them.
As the father of a child with Down syndrome, we have not felt any need to overhaul finances – but we are worried as hell about the cuts to services that greatly improve her life.
Rather than decry the cuts to the NDIS, instead we have stories bemoaning that total disability funding would reach $100bn.
Consider an article about family trusts that contained the quote: “The idea of giving your kids $1,000 a week in spending money a week – you won’t do that any more.”
As the line in The Big Short goes: “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging.”
In the past two weeks the conservative media has discovered young people exist – but only young people who negatively gear, or are in a trust or earn capital gains.
Oddly there has been almost no mention of how many more young people will now be able to automatically claim $1,000 in work expenses due to changes in the budget:
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It’s rare to have such a stark differences in a budget – people with disabilities suffering some of the biggest cuts on record while the wealthiest in society lose some tax breaks and they are apparently the group most deserving of our concern.
What a society of ghouls we are if we let that be the truth.
Greg Jericho is a Guardian columnist and chief economist at the Australia Institute
