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People are healthier in Germany? Maybe because Germany has universal health care.

Which, of course, no English-speaking country has. (And if you want to quibble about those being English-speaking countries, either you're being snarky about the variants of English spoken there, in which case you should be ignored, or you're talking about the second of the countries listed there, where English is one of the official languages, and the other one is also a "strong-FTR" language, to use Chen's terminology, just as English is.)

In Australia it is the PBS - http://www.pbs.gov.au/ - Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - which is already under financial strain.

The PBS is administered in Australia by Medicare - http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/provider/pbs/index.jsp

Somehow I don't think Australians suffer from an overpopulation problem. In fact they have a strictly managed immigration policy to keep population numbers up.

This is simply about taking steps to 'save money' in a country that provides universal health care. Across the board immunisation is a lot cheaper than paying the medical costs for those that get infected whether they be rich or poor. In Australia private health insurance just supplements universal health care, giving access to private hospitals, often just wards of major public hospitals (you pay extra to get quicker non-emergency treatment, all emergency treatment is still done at public hospitals because they have the facilities and can access private and public doctors often one in the same).

So the Australia government takes makes steps to save medical expenditures including early screening promotion, health safety promotion and the PBS scheme http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/provider/pbs/index.jsp (the government puts a lot of effort to ensure drugs are economical because Australians pay one low subsidised price for all prescriptions covered by the scheme)

OK - The process is that the documents in question are sent by a medical care provider to the Medicare Australia Department of Human services.
Anytime a human being is forced to something against his/her inner conviction/believe, steps against this force have be taken into account.
If the force is caused by a governmental law and steps against it are taken, the law may be broken.

In this Australian Childhood immunization campaign there seem to exists a procedure to get exempt and have no financial disadvantage (as previously posted):

http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/public/forms.jsp#N10009 :
Conscientious Objection form [PDF, 131Kb] – used to record a parent's personal, philosophical, religious or medical belief that immunisation should not occur. This form must be signed by a doctor or immunisation provider and sent to the Immunisation Register.

The sensationalist ABC report quoted and parts of it pasted in the original post lack that information.

as opposed to the republican health care program in which the richest country in the world can't take care of its citizens' basic needs.

Richest in total, not richest per person and since you have to provide health care per person (as opposed to say funding a science project) that's the one that counts. The US is eight with the current figures but since the dollar has fallen a lot compared to the euro I expect it to slide out of the top ten as more updated figures arrive.

as opposed to the republican health care program in which the richest country in the world can't take care of its citizens' basic needs.

Richest in total, not richest per person and since you have to provide health care per person (as opposed to say funding a science project) that's the one that counts. The US is eight with the current figures but since the dollar has fallen a lot compared to the euro I expect it to slide out of the top ten as more updated figures arrive.

I'm in Australia, and we've got a national healthcare system, (Medicare, which operates in parallel with the private health system.

Essentially, those earning over $50k (IIRC) are taxed an additional 1% for healthcare. Medication on the PBS is subsidised by the government (A$3.50 for low-income individuals, $22 for everyone else), and covers most everyday prescription medication. As for general practitioners, "bulk billing" is the tagline that refers to doctors that bill directly to Medicare (read: $0 out of pocket), which is approx. $30 from the government for each consultation. Unfortunately, there's a trend lately towards not taking on any new bulk-billing patients with the current shortage of general practitioners.

On the whole though, it's a pretty fair system - I recently had a cholecystectomy, and had approx. $200 out of pocket charges.. $100 for the x-ray, and $100 for the specialist consultation. The surgery itself is free in public hospitals, and I only had to wait about 3 weeks.

The private health system operates their own hospitals; costs start at about $400-500/year for individuals... but I'll let someone else cover that. Or Google.