Health: How Australians could get a better deal at the pharmacy

So the report covers a lot of ground.

It details how pharmacies could deliver better value through a range of reforms, including changing the rules on how much they can discount medicines and the kinds of services they offer.

But before we get to those solutions, the report's really arguing that the current system is not working as well as it should be for both patients and taxpayers.

What are the big problems with the current pharmacy sector, Peter?

Well, you said in your introduction how vital this part of the health system is.

Patients go there more than they go to any other part of the health system, and we're already spending billions of dollars on it between government and consumers, and it's going to have to do more because Australia's getting older, Australians are getting sicker, more drugs are being added to the PBS, more people are taking more medicine.

So really important to make this system work as well as it can.

But what do we want? What do we want it to look like? We want affordable medicines.

That's probably number one, because it's clear from surveys that a lot of people can't afford their medicine today, particularly people on lower incomes.

So that's absolutely key.

And affordable for government as well, because health spending is really rocketing up at the moment.

We need to make sure government's getting good value as well as consumers.

So that's affordability, goal number one.

The second thing we want to see in this sector is robust competition.

Why is that? Because these are actually private businesses making profits, and so the deal there should be, if we're gonna set you up to fund you and you're gonna make profits, we know those profits are growing, you need to be working as hard as possible to give patients the best experience, to make sure you're providing the highest quality care.

But we don't see that level of competition in the system for reasons we'll no doubt get into.

And finally, there's been a long debate about should pharmacies provide more different kinds of services.

In recent years, they've started vaccinating.

Should they do more kinds of care? And we want to see that happen, but in a way that is carefully planned, in line with evidence, and gets the best results for both taxpayers and patients.

So those are the things we want to see.

But each of those is systematically blocked by bad policy.

So affordability, we've got rules that stop pharmacies offering discounts to patients.

We've got random made-up fees and numbers that government is tipping into the system that aren't based on ev- any evidence.

For competition, it's throttled by really unusual rules that stop the system competing to improve care for consumers.

And on services, we've seen this patchwork of state trials that we keep churning through, and we're not really getting anywhere in terms of working out what the future should look like.