Two months ago, in an interview for an entirely different story, Flexi Care general manager Adrian Morgan raised an issue that I had yet to stumble across.
Providers across the sector, he said, were watching the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing approve people for home care packages and then fund them at just 60 per cent of what they’d actually been assessed as needing, with no explanation offered and none forthcoming when asked.
He also confirmed that the missing 40 per cent isn’t held in reserve and paid out later. Recipients move to full funding eventually, sometimes within a few weeks, but Morgan said his organisation had clients wait as long as five months on the reduced rate before receiving what they had been approved for. In the meantime, that money isn’t backdated or reimbursed. It simply isn’t paid.
It was a situation that he then labelled as being: “Head-scratching and ridiculous.”
After last night’s explosive Four Corners investigation, Adrian and many other home care providers have finally found their answer.
Four Corners has now confirmed the mechanics Morgan was describing, and revealed what they’re actually being used for. Under the rule, which took effect on November 1 alongside the broader Support at Home reforms, more than 90 per cent of people granted a package are started on an interim payment of 60 per cent of their approved funding. The average wait to reach full funding is 10 weeks, though as Morgan’s own experience shows, some people wait considerably longer.
Here is the part that turns a funding oddity into a scandal: the moment someone starts receiving that 60 per cent interim payment, the department removes them from the official aged care waitlist, despite the fact they still haven’t received the level of care they were assessed as needing.
Before the reforms, people stayed on the published waitlist until their full package came through. Now, the clock simply stops the moment partial funding begins.
The effect on the headline numbers has been dramatic. The department’s official waitlist currently sits at 100,191. Using the same counting method applied consistently since public reporting began in 2017, the real figure is 153,909, a gap of more than 53,000 people who are still waiting for the funding they were assessed as needing, but who no longer appear anywhere in the government’s public statistics.
Put simply: the sudden, celebrated drop in the waitlist after the “once in a generation” reforms took effect wasn’t the result of people getting care faster. It was largely the result of a change to what counts as “waiting” at all.
Former acting inspector-general of aged care Ian Yates didn’t hold back when Four Corners put the figures to him, describing the change as unacceptable and calling on the government to report people on interim funding as a separate, visible figure so the true scale of the wait can actually be monitored.
Confronted directly with the discrepancy, Aged Care Minister Sam Rae continued with the lies and denied anything had changed at all, telling reporters the waitlist has always been calculated the way it currently is.
Asked point blank whether the published waitlist includes people still on interim funding, he said it doesn’t: once someone receives a package at the level they were assessed for, they stop being counted. That answer simply restates the new rule as though it were the old one, and quietly skips over the more than 53,000 people currently living in the gap between “started receiving something” and “received what they were assessed as needing.”
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in May, seemed to concede more than his minister has been willing to: the state of aged care, he said, is not good enough.
This shifting of the goalposts on what constitutes “waiting” is yet another example of calculated deception, which has become a hallmark of the current administrations tenure overseeing aged care.
It sits alongside the classification algorithm and the priority algorithm already exposed by Four Corners this week: another mechanism, buried in legislative detail, that has the effect of making the government’s own performance look better without actually delivering more care, sooner, to the people who need it.
