The AIHW has revealed that mental health issues and substance abuse are costing Australia more than ever.
The AIHW released its annual summary of national disease expenditure on 2 December 2022, which showed that between 2018–19 and 2019–20, spending on mental and substance use disorders grew to replace injury as the fourth highest disease group, with a price tag of $10.8 billion.
To put that in perspective, according to the AIHW, from 2018 – 2020 an estimated $398.2 billion was spent on health goods and services in Australia, equating to an average of approximately $15,698 per person, $425.76 of which was for mental health and substance abuse – or just over $100 a year for every Australian.
AIHW spokesperson, sociologist, and head of the Health Systems Group, Dr. Adrian Webster, said it was likely that the initial stages of the pandemic contributed to mental and substance use moving from fifth to fourth place, and highlighted that as the analysis did not include direct costs from outside of the health care sector or estimates of the indirect costs due to illness, these impacts could be even greater.
“The cost of disease is not just financial – being unwell or suffering from a health condition has other effects on quality of life, affecting people’s ability to work or do the activities they enjoy,” Dr Webster explained.
“How much is financially spent on treating, managing, or preventing conditions can be influenced by a range of factors such as the cost and availability of effective treatments, and disease prevalence.
“As such, the disease expenditure estimates in this report do not necessarily reflect the incidence or prevalence of those conditions, or the full ‘burden’, or human cost.”
For the first time, the report also contained initial figures on the spending attributed to treating patients with COVID.
“In 2019–20, an estimated $183 million was spent on treating COVID patients, with $85 million spent in public hospitals, $2 million in private hospitals, and $96 million through pathology testing,” Dr Webster said.
“Spending on COVID was distributed across all age groups but was highest for both males and females in the 30–39 age groups.”
Overall, estimated spending by disease increased by $6.5 billion (in current prices) to $140.4 billion in 2019–20, up from $134.0 billion in 2018‑19 – an overall growth of 4.8% at current prices.
Expenditure on the top three diseases stayed the same, dominated by musculoskeletal disorders such as back pain and arthritis, which were responsible for $14.6 billion (10.4%) more health spending than any other group of conditions, with cardiovascular diseases ($12.7 billion) and cancer ($12.1 billion) ranked second and third.
“Around 73% of recurrent health spending in 2019–20 could be attributed to specific disease groups,” Dr Webster explained, noting that growth in spending on related areas such as public health, community health, health administration, health research and capital expenditure, were also excluded from the study.
“[However], over one-third of health spending on disease groups goes towards musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, cancers and mental and substance use, and there are distinct differences between the sexes.”
For females, the reproductive and maternity services group attracted the most health spending at $8.6 billion, followed by musculoskeletal disorders at $7.7 billion, and both cancers and mental and substance use disorders cost an estimated $5.5 billion.
For males, cardiovascular diseases dominated at $7.2 billion, followed by musculoskeletal disorders and cancers, at $6.4 billion each, then injury, with a price tag of $5.4 billion.
The bulk of spending tended to occur later in life, with the highest spending for both males ($268,883) and females ($249,601) among those aged 70–74 – excluding those aged 85 years and over.
Males also attracted a higher level of disease spending at ages 1 – 4, at $334,995 compared to $280,072, however spending for females between the ages of 20 to 44 was significantly higher than for males, due to birth and reproduction-related expenditure.