Imagine the stress and anxiety that would come from being diagnosed with an invasive form of breast cancer. Now imagine that you're getting hit with medical costs at the same time.

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The costs are coming in so quickly that you have to keep a spreadsheet just to keep track of them all. Before you know it, the sum total at the bottom of the spreadsheet is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

This was the experience of Luan Lawrenson-Woods: a breast cancer survivor who now advocates on behalf of patients. The most alarming part of her story is that Luan isn't from New York, New Jersey or New Hampshire. She's from New South Wales.

Australians are rightly proud of our universal healthcare system. Australians look at countries like the United States - where 65 per cent of people who file bankruptcy blame medical bills as the primary cause - with astonishment: astonishment that a whole country of people would be comfortable with that as a policy outcome.

Australia is far from being like America. But stories like Luan's highlight that we are just as far from being a panacea when it comes to universal healthcare.

Moving from anecdote to data, the problems with out-of-pocket costs are plain to see.

Australians paid a whopping $1.3 billion of out-of-pocket costs in 2024. This will rise to $1.7 billion each year by 2030 if this trend continues.

Residents of the ACT have it the worst. Average out-of-pocket costs in the ACT are almost double the nationwide average. It's so bad that we now see Canberrans travelling to Adelaide for treatment in what's called "medical tourism".

Someone getting a hip replacement could pay up to $200 for their initial out-of-hospital consults. They could pay up to $1600 for the procedure in hospital, another $300 for an anaesthetist and another $300 for accommodation, plus up to $200 for out-of-hospital follow-ups.

"I'm not an outlier" warned Luan. "In the breast cancer community some........

© Canberra Times