Health Care Card
Australian documentation of eligibility for health care benefits
The Australian Health Care Card is a card issued by the Australian Government which evidences the entitlement of the cardholder to concessions, such as the cost of some prescription medicines, medical services, and other government concessions. Eligibility for the card is determined by the eligibility (and registration) for various federal government welfare payments (see Centrelink). The benefits are clearly shown on the card. Some benefits (most notably public transport ones in some areas) are only available to recipients of certain Centrelink benefits.
The card is issued after an applicant has successfully applied for one or more of the associated payments. The card is valid for six months, after which time it is renewed if the holder continues to be in receipt of the payment for which the card was granted. This includes periods in which the holder received a "zero rate" of payment due to income reported.
Eligibility
A person may be eligible for a Low Income Health Care Card if they are not eligible to a Pensioner Concession Card. This is assessed through a separate claim to a health care card, based on the average weekly income received by the claimant (and their partner, if applicable) in the eight weeks prior to claiming the card. Income thresholds for the card vary depending on the claimant's circumstances (i.e.: if single, a member of a couple, and a member of a couple with children), which the threshold increasing based on the number of children in care.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Health Care Card” as australian documentation of eligibility for health care benefits. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “Health Care Card” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.