Background: Private psychiatric services are produced and consumed on a fee-for-service (FFS) basis in Australia. The Commonwealth Government subsidises these (and all) medical services via Medicare, a universal, comprehensive, tax-financed medical and hospital financing mechanism. A key purpose...

The production of specialist psychiatric services in Australia reflects the “mixed” system of public and private production of health services generally. This paper, an exercise in descriptive or positive economics, is concerned only with private production, i.e. those services provided by...