Stress Costs Taxpayer $300K Every Day

Release date: 21 Jul 2009

Stress is costing our community billions of dollars every year, according to data compiled by Lifeline Australia, including some brand new information.

New data shows that stress is costing the tax payer at least $107 million a year in Medicare Benefits as well as being responsible for $15 billion in annual lost productivity.

“Our modern life is stressful, the speed in which we are expected to live and work is becoming bad for our health,” Lifeline CEO Dawn O’Neil said today.

“The current financial crisis is not helping either, as people start to feel the pinch of higher a cost of living, more unemployment, longer working hours and greater expectations in the work place. It’s resulting in more stress leave and more visits to the GP with stress related symptoms.”

Lifeline asked the Family Medicine Research Centre at the University of Sydney for the latest results from their Bettering the Evaluation And Care of Health (BEACH) program (unpublished data 2009). BEACH showed that these stress related symptoms accounted for 2.55% of all GP visits. This means there were about 2.9 million GP consultations for stress related symptoms, covered by Medicare benefits in 2008-09. This is costing the Australian Government $107 million dollars a year. That’s almost $300,000 a day out of the taxpayer’s pocket.

“This new data from the University of Sydney is quite conservative at 2.55% of total visits to the GP,” Ms O’Neil said.

“However, $300,000 tax dollars a day for stress is still a shock.”

“Also, we think it’s important to note that research from America puts the percentage of GP visits for stress at around 70%, so this is certainly conservative.”

A recent report by Medibank found that people in Australia are taking 3.2 sick days a year for stress, resulting in $5.12 billion in lost productivity. However, ‘presenteeism’ or when stressed people go to work but can’t function, adds $9.96 billion to this number. “

Just how much is stress costing us? These are only two aspects of our economy. In a time when the world is facing a financial crisis, we think it’s time to stress down as a nation,” Ms O’Neil said.

To help the country stress less, Lifeline is holding Stress Down Day, on Friday 24 July. For more information, go to www.stressdown.org.au or text the word ‘stressdown’ to 0485 4RELAX.

For more information on the BEACH data, or for a stress management toolkit, contact Lifeline For further information or comment contact: Chris Wagner, Lifeline Australia, 02 6215 9446 or 0434 378 939

Media Contact: Chris Wagner (ph: 0434 378 939)