Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2011 and related bills. This legislation provides for the means testing of Australia's private health insurance rebate. Make no mistake: these changes will force people out of private health insurance coverage and onto cheaper policies that provide either less coverage or no coverage at all, shifting their healthcare needs to an already overstretched public system.

As with any market, when you have people pull out it pushes the cost up for everyone who wants to stay in that market. That is what we are going to see in private health insurance markets with the passage of this legislation. The smaller take-up of insurance products will drive up premiums, just further entrenching the increased cost of having private health insurance that smaller rebates will create, preventing even more Australians from being able to pay. The government's insurer, Medibank Private, has itself announced that it is expecting 37,000 of its members to completely drop their insurance as a result of these changes, while another 92½ thousand people with insurance are likely to downgrade their cover. Given that this is just from one insurer, the impact across the entire industry is set to be devastating.

For a Labor government that wanted to expand the level of federal funding for Australia's health system, this is a clear U-turn to shift some of the burden from its own health related expenses over to the state funded system. We have a public health system in Australia, particularly in my state of Queensland, that is in tatters. We simply cannot afford to have the consequences of this legislation add to that burden, as they undoubtedly will.

At the Townsville General Hospital, we already saw the consequences of funding cuts late last year with doctors concerned about around $54 million of funding for the hospital being dropped. It took a public campaign to force the government to reinstate just a small portion of that by supporting a paediatric intensive care unit at the hospital. If the Queensland government cannot afford the public health needs of the region now, and the paediatric intensive care unit is $8.4 million, how can we expect the Queensland health system to handle the greater strain of the system unless North Queenslanders can afford private health coverage?

The first point that needs to be made in this debate is that the legislation is not about fairness. Despite the way the Labor Party has tried to argue these changes, it is not the superficial class-warfare argument that low-income earners are subsidising health care for the rich. This bill directly impacts 2.4 million people in those three income tiers who face increased premiums, of 14 per cent, 29 per cent and 43 per cent, for all three tiers. Added to this is the fact that every Australian on a private health insurance policy will be impacted when they have to face higher costs for their coverage as a result of the upward pressure that this legislation places on insurance premiums. There are around five million Australians with private health insurance who are on an annual income below $50,000. At a time when the cost of living is already going through the roof, those five million people will have to cop higher premiums on their health insurance as a result of this legislation. How is that going to give low-income Australians a fair go?

Giving every Australian access to high-quality health care at an affordable price is a core principle of Australia's healthcare system. Providing choice in health care is not only an important right in itself but further allows government to manage healthcare access and ensure that its quality is maintained by taking pressure off the government funded public systems. For Australia to have a choice, private healthcare options need to be affordable, and a big part of that is rewarding Australians who choose private health care. The previous, coalition, government introduced a raft of measures, including the private health insurance rebate, the Medicare levy surcharge, and lifetime health cover, which provided Australians with more affordable healthcare choices. The outcome of this was to see private healthcare coverage in Australia jump by over 10 per cent to coverage of more than 44 per cent over the course of the Howard government. Econtech states that for every $1 spent supporting private health insurance $2 is saved by the public system. In Townsville, a private organisation, Queensland X-Ray, in conjunction with the Mater Hospital and without any funding or support from this government, have gone and bought their own positron emissions tomography or PET/CT scanner at a cost of $2.4 million. The cost in the public system was $9 million. The Queensland health system has said that it is going to put in another one now that the other one has arrived. The PET scanner is an outpatient service; it is not an inpatient or dedicated part of oncology treatment. The public system will do a maximum of three scans per day. At Queensland X-Ray they will do up to 15 or, if necessary, 17 scans per day. That is the difference between public and private health care. They will go through and do the work required because it is there to be done. They are already receiving calls from patients coming from Darwin, Cairns and all over the place to use this new facility, because it is a properly driven, properly funded and properly run machine with no help from this government. The private health system has proven to be a crucial part of Townsville's health network. Thanks to the city's two private hospitals, the Mater Hospital and the Mater Women's and Children's Hospital, Townsville now has its own PET scanner.

Any measure that is a blow to private health cover is a blow to healthcare access in North Queensland. Some 49,435 people in my electorate have private health insurance, with just over 70,000 people covered out of a population of 195,000. This bill poses a serious threat to the standard of health care that those Townsville residents can afford and it poses a serious threat to the availability and quality of health care of everyone in Townsville who find themselves at the already overburdened Townville Hospital. Private hospitals are responsible for treating 40 per cent of patients in Australia. This significant proportion of health care keeps the pressure off the public system. We cannot afford to have that figure plummet as a result of lower private health coverage. It is incredibly narrow-minded of this government to try and save a few bucks on the private health insurance rebate at the expense of not just Australians with private health insurance but also the state government and its provision of public health care.

Forecasts have put the cost of this bill to the public health system at around $3.8 billion recurrent. Queensland Health is in a shambles and we are going to put more pressure on them here. Who is thinking of these things when they are putting this stuff together? In considering this bill, I spoke with Aaron Newman from Queensland Country Health, a private health insurance provider based in Townsville. Quite apart from being a major sponsor of the mighty North Queensland Cowboys, their research is telling them that up to 20 per cent of their clients may drop out of private health insurance immediately but that there is a high likelihood that people will also drop out of their extras.

A lot of this debate has centred around the hospital system, but I would like to talk about allied health and dentistry—those things which do not appear at the hospital and which are seriously affecting the regions. Places like Ayr, Ingham and Charters Towers, which are not inside my electorate but which currently provide physiotherapy and dentistry, may find that their client lists are diminished as people travel to Townsville and put further pressure on existing government resources. This may lead to yet another drain on the local community, as they are unable to sustain those sorts of businesses. The physiotherapist will go and the dentist will go, as the fabric of the town slowly but surely disappears because their residents cannot afford to maintain private health insurance and maintain these businesses in those regional centres and the smaller towns which feed into them. Queensland Country Health are very worried about a section of the community refusing to pay the extras and going into the public system.

There is also a real threat that if and when this does happen specialists in regional private hospitals who do complicated surgery will move to bigger cities to get their work. We heard the member for Hinkler talking about his private hospitals and the same stories are being told in every regional centre. As the work dries up they will have to move on. We have just gone through the exercise of trying to get a fair deal on building insurance for strata title buildings in Townsville and North Queensland as other insurers left the market. We have had increases of over 1,000 per cent in premiums as, one after another, insurance companies left the North Queensland market to concentrate on the big cities where they can get an economy of scale. Can this government or anyone in this government with its record of poor management guarantee that this will not happen in the health industry? They cannot guarantee it and you will see these things disappear. Medical professionals are just like everyone else when it comes to work: they will go where they are going to get paid. If the government makes it hard for them to make a living, they will just pack up and follow the others back to Sydney and Melbourne and the public purse will again have to pick up the tab for all the transport costs of people having to go down for routine operations that are being done in private hospitals and public hospitals in Townsville now.

Private health insurance is a key part of Australia's health system. It provides healthcare choice to Australians and relieves pressure from the publicly funded system, which results in savings for government and allows good health care to be provided to those who need it but cannot afford to pay for it. Part of making this choice affordable to all Australians is our private health insurance rebate, which helps make the insurance affordable and acknowledges that those who purchase it are saving the government money. Attacking the structure of this rebate will hurt people in regional Australia and Townsville with private health insurance and it will hurt healthcare institutions in Townsville and across the country. That is why this government said it would not do it before the 2007 election and why I will not be supporting it now. Let me say again that not one dollar of compensation will be going to the states. It is estimated that they will have to pick up 184,000 extra procedures, and the cost is estimated at $3.8 billion to save $2.4 billion for the federal budget. There are six seats in Townsville and we have four new candidates standing in seats held by other parties. Our nurses and doctors have already been belted by the Queensland Health pay debacle and they now have to cop it again with this bill. I call on the three sitting Labor members in Townsville to stand up for the health workers and stop this madness. The state Labor government must come out in support of cancelling this legislation because they simply cannot afford it. Queensland Health is broke now. They are in all sorts of strife. I also call on the four Liberal National Party candidates—John Hathaway for the seat of Townsville, David Crisafulli for the seat of Mundingburra, Sam Cox for the seat of Thuringowa and Liz Schmidt for the seat of Dalrymple—to stand shoulder to shoulder with Rosemary Menkens and Andrew Cripps to bring this down and make sure that they stand up for justice in our city and in our region.

This bill is not about health; it is about the vain hope of this government returning to a surplus. They do not care who or what they have to hurt on the way through. That is why they are willing to pass a cost of $3.8 billion onto the taxpayers of every state to save $2.4 billion and try to get back into surplus. I will not be supporting this bill and I will not be supporting inequity in health for any Australians.

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