Medicare/Public Funded Gastric/Bariatric Surgery

Today with the growing number of obese and morbidly obese people in Australian combined with the growing number of Australians with secondary and life threatening health issues relating to being over weight like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, mental health and suicide to name but a few. It is time that as a nation we consider the cost of surgery to reduce obesity verses the extremely high cost to our nation of the treatment of related conditions. Did you know that Gastric Sleeve or Gastric Bypass surgery has an 80% chance of curing type 2 diabetes in patients with a BMI of 35 (obese/morbidly obese) or more. Imagine that an operation that is performed in most cases in less than an hour can reduce a patients long term dependence on medication over a lifetime, imagine the savings on our Pbs system. Imagine the first hand life changes to that person and the knock on effect to their families and people that they come into contact with. Is it that hard to imagine that an obese parent has a higher chance of having obese children, that the relationship that they have with food can be passed on. Of course it isn't. This surgery is obviously available for people in Australia. However even with health insurance there is an out of pocket deficit of more than $5000. With no health insurance the upfront cost in most cases is more than $14000 thus making the surgery out of reach for most patients. Yet as a nation we would spend much more per person subsidizing medications on our overloaded pbs system to treat obese related health conditions. It is therefore in our best interest to help obese sufferers to combat their condition and have the double effect of saving the nations money, saving the obese and eventually having a healthier Australia.