Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2011 and cognate bills amend various acts to implement three new private health insurance incentive tiers. In simple terms, the legislation puts a means test on the private health insurance rebate. This is the third time that the bills have come before the House. It has twice before been defeated because this is bad legislation with terrible consequences, especially for rural areas but in fact for all families who may not be able to stand in the queue waiting for their elderly parent's knee replacement or who want a choice of specialist or doctor when their young child has an accident or is chronically ill and who understand where the best help may be.

Ironically, it was a Labor government that introduced Medicare in 1975. Medicare has always been described as a universal health insurance system. It is meant to be a system with equality of access for all Australians. It is a system that, as the previous speaker said, is the envy of the world. We do not suggest that it is cheap, but in a developed country like Australia we happen to believe that the health of our citizenry is worth a great deal of investment.

According to Private Healthcare Australia, there are 12 million Australians who have private healthcare cover at the moment. This legislation will directly impact on every one of the 12 million Australians who have that private health insurance. Every one of those 12 million Australians will have to consider their options if these bills are passed. They will have to ask themselves whether they can afford to continue their private health insurance or whether they have to join the long waiting lists in the public hospital system for urgent medical attention.

Australians with private health insurance are not what Labor likes to call 'the rich people' of the country, and I find it very offensive when we sit here in this place and hear names referred to as 'the rich' who are therefore somehow abhorrent and deserving of punishment. Almost half of the 12 million with private health insurance have an annual household income of less than $50,000; 25 per cent have an income of less than $35,000. Under any definition it is rather amazing to consider these people 'rich', even in the lexicon of Labor. The government would have you believe that it is stopping rich people from rorting and taking advantage of poor people. This is an appalling attempt at wedging and dividing according to Victorian era notions of class.

Labor's changes would affect single people on incomes of $80,000 or more or couples with incomes of $160,000 or more. Again, these are not people who have a lot of money to spare. They are not Labor's so-called 'rich people'. According to the ABS, the average weekly full-time earnings in August last year were just over $71,500.

In my electorate of Murray, 40 per cent of the community have private health insurance. That is not higher than average at all. But we in my electorate have done it tough recently, with seven years of drought, with floods and now with appalling federal government policy which threatens to take away people's water security and make it impossible for them to continue to be food and fibre producers. So my electorate is already looking hard at whether it can afford the current private insurance rates. With the changes that these bills imply, there is no doubt that private health insurance cover is going to get much more expensive. My constituents want private health insurance, but even now they are considering whether they can afford it. We must not make it harder for them. They are good people and they deserve decent health care. They do not deserve to wait five or six years for a new knee.

The government is attacking hardworking families—as I say, those who are trying to pay a mortgage, trying to pay the increases in childcare fees that this government is imposing and trying to pay the higher electricity charges that this government is presiding over. They are in dread of July, when the carbon tax will hit, take out jobs and make it almost impossible for them to meet their daily costs. On 1 July 2012 it will be D-day, doomsday, the day this government will bring in changes to the Medicare levy if it can, if these bills pass, but also the day when the carbon tax will be introduced.

These bills before us will force families and older Australians to decide whether they turn on their heaters in winter or whether they can instead afford to pay private health insurance. We should not have our citizenry forced to make such shocking decisions. On the one hand, the government is saying that as you get older there is an increase in the rebate for private health insurance from 30 per cent of the premium to 40 per cent, but an increase in rebate is no use if you cannot pay for the private health insurance basics in the first place.

Analysis from Deloitte on the economic impact of changes to the private health insurance system shows that in the first year 175,000 people would withdraw from private health cover, not being able to afford it, and a further 583,000, or over half a million, would downgrade their cover—again, because they simply would not be able to afford it. Over five years it is expected that 1.6 million would drop cover and 4.3 million would downgrade. The Minister for Health, on the other hand, would have us believe that this will not make a difference at all. 'No problems at all,' says the minister. In a press release on 19 January the Minister for Health, Ms Tanya Plibersek, said:

… Treasury modelling estimates that, after these changes come into effect, 99.7% of people will remain in private health insurance as a result of incentives such as Lifetime Health Cover and the Medicare levy surcharge.

Well, I suggest that Labor has got it wrong again and so has Treasury modelling. I prefer to believe Deloitte's economic impact research because it is the reality.

The expected withdrawal of people from private health insurance will result in larger premiums and we will see literally millions drop their private health insurance. This will have an enormous impact, particularly in country regions. We do not currently have equity of access to health services in country areas. We have a very great difference in the health outcomes of men, women, children and the elderly in rural areas compared with metropolitan areas. Our incidence of cancer is higher. The number of people who die earlier is higher. We have more accidents on farm and off-farm. We need at least equal access to health services in country areas. I would argue that we need better health services than those available in metropolitan areas.

A lot of our health services are now delivered through usually small but very adequate private hospitals. They supplement the work of the public hospitals in places like Shepparton, Bendigo and Ballarat. We know that the changes proposed in this legislation will kill off a number of those private hospitals. We also know that they will not be able to attract specialists—the metropolitan based surgeons, gynaecologists, obstetricians, paediatricians, specialists in immunology and so on—because those specialists invariably come to the private hospitals where they are better reimbursed. That is why they are attracted. These changes will kill off the private hospitals in my country areas and will also kill off the access to specialists and expert medical practitioners. I think that is appalling, and I condemn this government for overlooking that fact or for not caring.

What does a young person do who is active in sport and wants to make sure that they can have swift and immediate treatment if they sustain an injury? Under this new legislation, this young person is likely to have to say: 'I'll just have to join the queue. I'll just have to take out a ticket in the lottery. My knee reconstruction will have to wait because I'm in a very long queue. I can't afford private health insurance.' I think that is appalling.

Independent economics firm Econtech Pty Ltd has determined that every dollar of funding provided for the private health insurance rebate saves $2 of costs that are then paid by private health insurers. Public hospitals treat 40 per cent of all patients in Australia. I have already referred to their dependency on private health insured people. It is not surprising that Deloitte estimates that public hospital costs will add an extra $1.4 billion in additional recurrent costs to the government budget of 2016. What appalling and short-sighted action this is, not to mention a breach of faith, since this government, when trying to convince the population to vote for it, claimed it would not meddle with private health insurance. We know a lot of other promises have gone west when it comes to this government, but this was another one of the significant promises that it has broken.

I turn now to Strathbogie shire in my electorate of Murray. It is only a small shire of some 10,000 or so people. It has two hospitals in Nagambie and Euroa and a medical centre in Violet Town. The problem for residents of the Strathbogie shire is that there is not a single public health bed in the shire. You are required to be privately insured in the Strathbogie shire if you want to access a local hospital, particularly in the case of emergency. I want members on the other side to think through this dilemma. When you do not have any public beds but people cannot afford private health insurance, and when there are only private beds in the bush nursing hospital, which is the case, what do those people do? They call a friend or neighbour to drive them with their broken leg from Euroa to Benalla or Shepparton—an hour-plus one way. You cannot have babies in these local hospitals. There is a serious impact when you make the cost of private health insurance even greater in areas where there are no public bed alternatives.

This is a serious issue of equity of access to health services in a developed country that used to take pride in admitting anybody at the door of a hospital for urgent and immediate treatment. It is an intolerable situation. It has resulted in some 3,500 public patients in the shire of Strathbogie being taken to hospitals outside the shire every year because there are no public beds in the shire. Most are sent to Goulburn Valley Health, as well as to Wangaratta and Benalla. It is not fair. The shire of Strathbogie is not out the back of Uluru or somewhere near Katherine in the Northern Territory; it is only 2½ hours up the Hume Highway from Melbourne. It is a disgrace that the shire is having to beg for public beds. This legislation is only going to exacerbate the problem for them.

Prior to the 2007 election Labor was adamant that there would be no changes to the private health insurance rebates. It knew what the public understood about private health insurance. It knew it would be an anathema to announce that the government were going to interfere with the brilliant system that Australia has, but here we go—this is what they are doing. Here we go again, lining up with the other disasters. We have the BER stuff-up, where schools in my electorate have not as yet had a sod turned despite the promised $2 million or so for their building. We have the lack of value for money in those Building the Education Revolution infrastructure efforts. We have the pink batts disaster, where people died, and we are still trying to sort that out with the extra millions being spent. We have the set-top boxes debacle, where little old men and women pensioners could have been given, for a few hundred dollars, a brand new television set but instead had a retrofitted box which did not work on their old set and which still has not given them access to television like other Australians. The waste of money by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments goes on and on—five successive deficit budgets.

How is this government going to bring the budget back into some semblance of order given that it keeps talking about having a surplus? I think they have hit on this great plan: they are going to cut the private health insurance rebate. This bill will add $2.5 billion to government coffers, as someone clever in Treasury has worked out. This is appalling. To this Labor government, I say, get your house in order, start to manage the finances of this country appropriately and put a measure or a rule across all of your projects that you now mismanage and bungle and fail to deliver in a timely way. Do not attack private health insurance. Do not take away from the ordinary men and women of Australia access to health services that are necessary for a decent life. Certainly in rural and regional Australia, don't kill our private hospitals and make us wait even longer for essential medical services. This is not the Australian way.

I say shame on the Labor government for imagining that they are going to bluff their way through this period, with the Independents, who no doubt still have long shopping lists, there to support them. We have to reject this bill completely. I will not support it and I am responding to all the constituents who have asked me to say no. I will absolutely be saying no.

See this speech in context