Canberra's two main hospitals are among the most expensive to run in Australia, thanks to generous staff superannuation and high administration costs.
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Expenses are so high in the capital that an emergency patient admitted to an ACT ward costs more than twice as much to treat as similar patients in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.
The latest national data also shows that, in 2011-12, ACT hospital costs were Australia's highest for elective and acute-care patients, while the costs of treating Canberra's subacute patients (such as those in rehabilitation or palliative care) were second only to Northern Territory hospitals.
Even when Canberra's hospitals were compared only with other principal referral hospitals, they still had the highest costs: $6365 per patient, 25 per cent more than the national average.
Opposition Leader Jeremy Hanson questioned why the ACT's hospitals cost so much when other jurisdictions were "performing much better".
"The Canberra Hospital is so full it has been described as 'unsafe', we wait longer for ED treatment than anyone else in Australia, we wait longer for elective surgery than anyone else, and yet we pay more," Mr Hanson said.
"It is clear that our hospital system is not well managed and the Health Minister for the past six years, Katy Gallagher, has failed to deliver the efficient hospital services that Canberrans deserve."
An ACT Health spokeswoman said the high expenses were partly due to the territory's small size.
"ACT Health corporate overhead costs are spread across only two public hospitals as opposed to what happens in larger states that generally allocate local hospital district overhead costs to several hospitals under their management."
The spokeswoman also said more than a third of the hospital's workforce were members of the Commonwealth's closed, defined-benefit, superannuation scheme, "which is a very costly scheme compared to those currently operating in other states".
She added that, unlike larger jurisdictions, the ACT suffered diseconomies of scale when providing high-cost, specialised services, such as cardiothoracic surgery, which were "not as cost-efficient when run in small jurisdictions, where the fixed costs are spread across a small number of patients".
"However, the alternative is to not run these services at all and to require patients and their families to travel interstate to access such services. The ACT government has chosen to help its community access such services closer to home and bears the cost of this."
The analysis of national hospital expenses was compiled by the Independent Hospital Pricing Authority, which promotes efficient and accessible public hospitals.
The ACT government spends over $700 million a year on Canberra's public hospitals. It is the largest single expense in the budget, covering about $1 in every $7 spent.
