Published 27 March 2024, revised 10 April 2024
AHPA was pleased to collaborate with NDIS provider peak bodies in a joint statement responding to the NDIS 2023-2024 Annual Pricing Review. AHPA and many of our members have raised concerns about pricing for some years now .
The vast majority of providers, including allied health professionals providing therapy supports, are not the greedy overchargers sometimes portrayed in the media. On the contrary, AHPA’s members have given examples to the National Disability Insurance Agency of providers who deliberately fail to bill or undercharge participants. This is because our clinical health professionals’ fundamental concern is that participants should receive the level of supports that they need – but current NDIS approaches to pricing do not sufficiently factor in the necessary costs of providing good quality, meaningful services to people with disability.
Therapy supports are one of the few areas in the NDIS that have not even had price indexation – for the past four years before the current Review – let alone any price increases. References to NDIS prices as a ‘wedding tax’ or as a way of funding someone’s beach house are a far cry from the reality for NDIS allied health providers who are struggling to break even, much less make a profit in their business.
As the Joint Statement warns, this state of affairs mean that more and more providers, regardless of size, will be forced to leave the NDIS. The Australian public should understand this growing risk to service provision in a context where many NDIS participants already have difficulty in obtaining the therapy supports that they need and have been approved to receive. For some years now the rates of participants being able to actually take up approved therapy supports have been significantly lower than the rates for NDIS supports as a whole, and this is getting worse.
The Joint Statement sets out some ways forward to support viable NDIS services and so assist participants to live their lives as well as they possibly can.
Read the Joint Statement.