Australia's Health Minister Peter Dutton recently indicated that contracting out further public hospital services to the private sector is one option that the government might consider when trying to reduce expenditure on public hospitals. There is, however, 'no publicly available, solid evidence to show that such outsourcing generates savings', writes Anne-Marie Boxall, director of the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research in [s]The Conversation[/s]. 'In fact, some of the both private and public hospital executives we interviewed for a research paper on hospital contracting said it is sometimes more expensive to contract out the care of public patients to private hospitals… [They] explained this is often because contracting is done in an ad hoc way.'
[link url=http://theconversation.com/does-contracting-public-care-to-private-hospitals-save-money-23910]Full The Conversation report[/link]