In several articles published over the last few weeks, the Federal Minister for Mental Health has defended against criticism that the ATAPS program is not able to meet the demand for mental health care. On Friday, the Minister was not able to provide any figures to confirm that he had met his targeted pledge of expanding ATAPS to allow an additional 14,400 people to receive psychological care. In both instances, the Minister made the bold claim that the $200 mil funding boost for ATAPS would allow that program to provide psychological treatment to an additional 185,000 people. Expanding ATAPS is long overdue, however, the system is just not ready for the proposed changes on the table.

To understand why, it is important to consider this issue in the proper scale in terms of real people. Looking at the overall numbers of people who use ATAPS and Medicare, we can see that the ATAPS program reaches around 20,000 people annually, whereas Medicare reaches 500,000 people each year. That means that ATAPS reaches less than 5% of the number of people, in real terms, as Medicare does.

The Federal Government has cut $400 mil from Better Access and re-invested $200 mil into ATAPS. As we have shown before, ATAPS is more expensive to run, as one would expect for a program that is supposed to bridge some of the gaps that Medicare and other programs can’t reach. The problem is that those gaps get bigger every time the Federal Government cuts Medicare. And if only half of that funding is re-directed back into psychological treatment programs, as is the case here, then it is plain to see that the average Australian is going to be less able to access timely psychological treatment should they need to.

The Minister has pledged that an extra 14,000 people would be reached by ATAPS by July 2012, but the figures from the March 2012 report for ATAPS don’t show anywhere close to that level of growth. With only 3 months remaining to the pledged deadline, the report showed that ATAPS reached approximately 15,000 people in total. For argument sake, even if ATAPS had reached the pledged target, it would still be working far below the capacity of Medicare. The July 2012 target would bring ATAPS up to 35,000 people, just 7% of the 500,000 people who receive psychological treatment in Medicare each year. Assuming that the Minister’s bold claim is right that ATAPS will reach an additional 185,000 within the next two years, this will still only amount to 40% of the reach of Medicare for the same services.

Back in October, we did some calculations and found that there was an average cost in ATAPS of $882.35 per person for an episode of care (i.e., the average number of sessions used). By comparison, the average cost in Medicare came out to be under $600 per person even going by the most inflated estimates. These latest claims from the Minister confirm our prior calculations about the cost of ATAPS. If you begin with $200 mil and factor in the 15% to 25% funding leak that ATAPS directs to ‘administration’, you end up with between $150 mil and $170 mil left over for actual psychological services. At an average cost of $882.35 per person, the Minister’s pledged 185,000 extra people via ATAPS will cost $163,234,750. This figure of $163 mil sits right where we calculated it would.

At the broader level what all of this goes to show is that public access to mental health treatment is falling. A total of $200 mil has simply been stripped from Medicare, with the remaining $200 mil invested in programs that are much more expensive to run. How can the Minister justify reducing treatment for patients (including disadvantaged people) below minimum standards in Medicare? Does using Medicare make a patient less deserving of timely and appropriate mental health care?