Private and public patients in public hospitals in Australia

The nature of the private-public mix in health insurance and in health care is a major issue in most health systems.

To compare the hospitalization characteristics of private and public patients hospitalized in public hospitals.

We focused on planned, overnight and same-day admissions, discharged during 2004-2005 from the public New South Wales hospitals, and run fixed-effects regressions in order to identify the effect of accommodation status (private/public) on the hospitalization characteristics.

Private patients have one third less waiting days than public patients, and they are assigned higher urgency of admission. Length of stay and length of visit are both unrelated to the accommodation status, however, private patients tend to have more hours in ICU and more procedures performed during the hospitalization. In-hospital mortality and the number of transfers (wards) are not affected by the accommodation status.

Private patients are treated differently than public patients in public hospitals, reinforcing the private health insurance-related inequity in inpatient care identified by others. Two health policy issues emerge from the findings: the role of private health insurance in the Australian socialized medicine system, and in particular, in the public hospitals; and the way public hospitals are reimbursed for private patients.