Six Dollars Doctor Visits: Mister Abbott's Ridiculous Plan

Lesley Russell, senior research fellow at ANU in the College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, is an expert on health care reform and the impact of cost on patients' compliance with treatment and medication regimes. She has just one word for any proposed co-payment. Ridiculous.

Russell says that there is no evidence to say co-payments reduce inappropriate use of medical services, any more than they reduce appropriate use of medical services. She also says that there is much data to show that the lower the co-payment, the higher the compliance with medical treatment.

Which is the whole point really. What would co-payments do? They'd flood our already overburdened emergency rooms. Unless Terry Barnes's genius extra idea is implemented. Barnes was the author of the ACHR report and on Monday he told ABC News Breakfast that there was a way to ensure that didn't happen.

''In terms of emergency departments, I think the simple way to deal with it is to allow the states to charge a matching co-payment for people who do go to an emergency department.''

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