Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law) Share this | Hansard source

The government is committed to ensuring that payments made by Medicare Australia to medical practitioners for services rendered to Australians are legitimate, accurate and timely. Yesterday I reported to the House that the government is committed to improving the powers of Medicare to ensure illegitimate payments can be recouped and returned to the government. However, findings from investigations by Medicare raised significant compliance concerns in relation to one of the schemes under Medicare’s responsibility, a scheme implemented by the former government—that is, the chronic disease dental scheme. This potential noncompliance has been identified through an investigation of claiming data, information supplied to the Medicare fraud tip-off line and complaints by state law enforcement agencies.

In November 2008 Medicare commenced a two-phase investigation to determine the level of compliance with the scheme, analysing the claims of 28 dental providers. This first phase found that approximately $17 million in payments had been made to just 26 practitioners. An initial analysis suggests that none of these 26 practitioners fully met the requirements of the scheme and 12 had lodged claims for benefits prior to completing the services for which they were claiming, which is in breach of the guidelines of the scheme. I am advised that, following these disturbing initial results, the concerns around the level of possible noncompliance led Medicare to conduct a further survey of dental practitioners from the general population, and this found that up to 50 per cent of dental practitioners may have failed to comply with the requirements of the scheme.

I am not suggesting for one second that all or even the majority of these dentists have been doing the wrong thing. Many would have been trying to comply with the scheme and making honest mistakes. But the fact is that this is a poorly designed scheme with significant potential for rorting. When the former minister for health, the member for Warringah, announced the chronic disease dental scheme, it was projected to cost $377 million over four years. But it is costing close to that each year, and the total cost has been more than $800 million over the last two years alone. These figures starkly underline why this badly designed program needs to be scrapped and replaced with the Commonwealth dental scheme. The government want to close down the former government’s scheme and implement our election commitment to promote the Commonwealth dental health scheme, which would be a means tested scheme that would provide up to a million dental services to pensioners and concession card holders. This has been twice blocked in the Senate.

The bill for the opposition’s financial irresponsibility in health and their recklessness now stands at more than $2 billion and, because of their recklessness in opposing the government’s move to close down this scheme, this rises every day. This is one of the many legacies from the member for Warringah’s time as minister for health. I can just imagine the Liberal ads at the next election. They might go something like this: ‘This man is Tony Abbott. He can’t show you his face on television. It is not because he’s a dentist; it’s because he’s so embarrassed about his record as health minister of Australia.’ We know he is embarrassed about his record because he comes out and he says, incorrectly, that the billion dollars cut from the health system in 1996 was before his time. He claims, falsely, that it was not him—‘Wasn’t me, Gov; my hands are clean.’—when we know that is not the case.

It is not too late for the Leader of the Opposition to atone for some of his mistakes. It is too late to atone for ripping out $1 billion from Australia’s health system and then falsely claiming it was not him. It is too late to atone for freezing the GP places in Australia. But it is not too late to atone for his mistakes in the dental health scheme. It is not too late to atone, because he can atone by admitting he was wrong and instructing his senators to pass the government’s bill. It is time for the Leader of the Opposition to man up and say, ‘I got it wrong.’ And it is time for him to instruct his senators to get out of the way and let the government clean up his mess.

See this speech in context