An Auto-Eligible Health Care Card For Chronic Illness Is Crucial

$422.15. That's how much the bill for my last batch of medicines is. I opened a box delivered to me today and yelled when I saw the price. This is for three months worth of medication, and doesn't even cover all the medication I take over that period. If we added them all, including my pancreatic ezyme supplement Creon (I use about 18 tubs in a month) and Pulmozyme, a gene therapy treatment, we'd be at about $1000 every three months. $4000 a year. $108,000 over the course of my life so far.

With a health care card, currently supplied at bare minimum via a mobility allowance ($80 per fortnight) from Centrelink, that $422.15 would become about $50. I can afford $50.

We need Centrelink to create or change their rules so that certain chronic illnesses are automatically eligible for a health card card. Currently, you must be approved for a certain allowance or benefit - a cash payment - in order to get the card. Centrelink, or the Dept of Human Services, are constantly changing their rules to become more confusing, but last I looked into it, there's no way to simply get a health care card on its own.

Here's the dumb bit. Say you have CF or Down's Syndrome. Your illness isn't going anywhere. You have it for life. However, every year, you'll be sent a fairly exhaustive, 20 or so page form that asks you, essentially, to confirm you still have your illness.

"Yes, I still have my genetic mutation, the one I had at birth, of which there is no cure."

If you don't get that form in on time? Suspended. Payments cut off. Pharmacy no longer recognises your health care card. Miss the next 14 day deadline? Cancelled. You have to start again. Do you think Centrelink can just dip into your existing file, see the past form that state you have CF or Down's and say, "Oh, right, well, let's reinstate him?" NOPE! You have to tell them the same info all over again!

Without going into my suspicions that Centrelink's ethos is to establish a series of impediments, designed to frustrate claimants in a war of attrition, here's what we can do to fix it:
http://goo.gl/gLQjT - A GetUp campaign suggestion from Samantha Durrant (CF patient and receiver of double lung transplant), titled
'EVERYONE WHO HAS A CHRONIC ILLNESS SHOULD HAVE A HEALTH CARE CARD'.

Go on in and vote for this to move up the chain. You can do it via your Facebook or Google account. Write to your member for Health and Caring. As I commented on the site:

I have cystic fibrosis. I was born with it, I'll have it until I die. WIthout a healthcare card i would be looking at about $1000 every three months for my ongoing drugs. I can't have saved up for this "rainy day" because I wasn't born yet. Similarly, my parents couldn't have saved up, as they'd have had to have saved $108,000 so far, just for my meds. This doesn't cover 3 monthly specialist check ups, surgery (I've had 7 on my bowels alone), equipment and the various other joys of a chronic illness.
The current system is ridiculous. Centrelink are constantly throwing up roadblocks that result in recurrent reviews and changes, the ability to keep up with which would require superhuman bodyparts, not just a regularly working body. For certain diseases and illnesses that the sufferer will have to tend to for their entire lives, it just makes sense that they should be given a simple health care card, even if it is without any sort of money or stipend, just to keep the costs of living manageable.
When Cystic Fibrosis Victoria can't afford to keep essential services running, as is the case right now, then who else can we turn to when the broken health car card system is constantly waging a war of attrition against those who need a card.