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

I too wish to speak about the Private Health Insurance Amendment (Lifetime Health Cover Loading and Other Measures) Bill 2013 and the Private Health Insurance Amendment (Base Premium) Bill 2013. It should be an abiding principle in this country that Australians are encouraged to meet their own health related costs where they have the capacity to do that.

Under the Howard government, in particular with the first Howard minister for health, Michael Wooldridge, the coalition changed policy to particularly target younger Australians, to encourage younger Australians to take up health insurance and to take it up for a lifetime. We wanted them to maintain that insurance during their most active years but in particular into their older age or during their family and child-bearing time so that we could ensure the always finite resources for health covered as many in the Australian community as possible. There was not going to be good health for those who could afford it and a poorer health outcome for those who were less financially secure. All of that requires a substantial number of people in Australia to have private health insurance.

We understood only too well the pressures on the public health and hospital systems as they battled to keep down their waiting lists and as they battled to have reasonable waiting times for those needing non-emergency medical procedures, because we were appalled by stories of the elderly waiting for years for hip or knee replacements that would give them a pain-free and more active life. And why were they waiting for years? Because they did not have private health insurance. We were appalled by the fact that people without private health insurance would put off seeking medical diagnoses for issues and problems and therefore come late to treatment, often leading to very much poorer outcomes for those individuals.

An efficient private hospital sector is key to reducing waiting times and providing a competitive environment for the provision of health services in Australia. But this is the third destabilising move by Labor which leaves those with private health insurance less able to afford it and in a real quandary about what is the future in relation to what they can afford in premiums in, say, five, 10 or 15 years. What can they actually afford to drop in terms of the package that they are currently covered by under their private health insurance given their age or other family circumstances? This is introducing a real quandary in the minds of families who know how important it is to be able to get that medical support when their family or their loved ones need it but who have to make very serious assessments about what they can afford and what the Labor changes really mean in terms of costs in the near and further future.

The government has in fact failed to model the impacts of these latest changes. We are not quite sure what the lifetime health cover initiative impacts will be. We know they are going to put the prices up for private health insurance but we do not know exactly how, and that is a significant problem for both the insured and the insurers trying to work out what is going to be best for them into the future. Of course, a Labor government did give what was supposedly a cast-iron election commitment that they would not destabilise the policy environment for private health insurers and customers but, sadly, like so many other of their promises, this was not worth the paper it was written on. As I say, this is their third go at the private health insurance system and sector in Australia.

We have just heard from the previous speaker that in his electorate he had 70 per cent of his constituency privately health insured. I know him well and I know the member for Aston, Mr Tudge, has a middle-class outer-eastern-suburb constituency in Melbourne and they are 70 per cent privately insured. In Murray the proportion of people with private health insurance is 40.4 per cent. It is almost half the rate for the equivalent population size in metropolitan Melbourne—only 40.4 per cent can now afford private health insurance in the electorate of Murray. Tragically, there is a much more profound impact of that reduction in private health insurance in a place like the electorate of Murray, only three hours from metropolitan Melbourne. For example, in the small town of Euroa there is a hospital that was once a bush nursing hospital. There are no public beds available in the Euroa hospital. So unless you are privately health insured in that town or in the surrounding districts of Euroa, you cannot access that local hospital. You have to be put in an ambulance and taken to Shepparton, about a 45- to 50-minute drive away, or to Benalla, a similar distance away because there is, in reality, no public bed provision at the Euroa hospital.

You would think that would mean that just about everybody in the Strathbogie Shire—which is the shire where you will find the town of Euroa—would be privately health insured because they know of this circumstance. They know that it is deadly to have a heart attack in Euroa because you are going to have to be accommodated for your emergency help somewhere else. But no—there are very low incomes, and it is a socio-economically disadvantaged area. So the 40.4 per cent of those privately insured extends to the actual shire of Strathbogie.

This is therefore, I think, a significant human rights issue in this country. We have people who are not close to big public hospitals who are therefore substantially disadvantaged in an emergency—a crisis, an accident—on the farm or on the highways. They cannot quickly get access to a place to be treated or, perhaps, to have a longer-term treatment. They might be suffering from cancer and need oncology services. There is a very different business in Australia now between the haves and the have nots. That is not fair, and it is un-Australian.

The measures in this bill are going to make it less affordable and less likely that younger Australians will take out lifetime health cover. How absurd is that? How ridiculous is that in a country which does have an ageing population? In a country that does have significant issues, particularly in regional and rural Australia, with sun-exposure-related cancers, with a lot of respiratory illnesses and with Indigenous communities that have some of the poorest health diagnoses and conditions in the world? I also have in my electorate a significant number of refugees who have very profound issues in terms of their physical and mental health. They will no doubt be less able to afford this private health insurance in the future.

It is not a case in Australia that only the affluent buy private health insurance. That is not the case, and the member for Aston made that very clear in his stating of the statistics, where we have people who are on $50,000 income and less who are doing their best to afford their private health insurance. A family on $50,000 in Australia is not an affluent family, but they are taking out private health insurance because they do not want a long wait for their child or for their elderly parent or one of their family for non-emergency, elective surgery or some health service.

Of course, it is the case that this initiative is all about saving this cash strapped government some funds. We know that there is $1.6 billion already removed from the public hospitals' budgets. We know that is putting many of our public hospitals in an almost economically non-sustainable context. This is a serious time for hospitals and other health services in Australia as they look at the extraordinarily increasing costs of their energy bills, of their wages and when they look at how much it costs to keep themselves in business but they have had to meet a $1.6 billion reduction in budget from this federal government.

Yes, I can understand—but be appalled—by the rationale behind this move to claw back some of the support which in the past has encouraged people to take out lifetime health insurance, but it is a false economy. As you have people who delay seeking a diagnosis of a medical condition and as you have people having to wait in longer queues for things like a hip or a knee replacement, at the end of the day that in fact costs the economy in lost productivity in more serious conditions as those people are not supported in their earliest times of need.

These bills show no respect for the Australians who are quite a distance from the big public health providers in this country. They show no sensitivity or understanding for the real costs now confronting families or younger people as they battle to deal with the impacts of the carbon tax and as they battle to deal with lower employment prospects—particularly in rural and regional Australia.

For example, in my electorate we have just had some 100 orchards no longer able to supply their fruit to the local SPC Ardmona canning factory. While that is an extraordinary catastrophe for those more than 100 orchards, the impacts on their employed workforce, whether permanent or seasonal workers—who include pickers or pruners, packers, those in the transport sector and the more than 800 in the factories themselves—is that they all now face a very unpredictable future in terms of their employment. How are they going to view these new costs and unsure outcomes in terms of private medical insurance? I can tell you that they understand the importance of being privately medically insured, particularly with a lifetime health cover, but they cannot afford it. They certainly deserve to have health services equal to the best available in other parts of the country.

Murray is only 40.4 per cent privately health insured now and, no, that does not compare at all with the 70 per cent and the 80 per cent you will find in metropolitan Melbourne. I think that is going to play out in the statistics of the future when we will see even more disparity between morbidity in country versus metropolitan areas in terms of lifetime expectations and of cancer outcomes, and the numbers of people who are diagnosed earlier with significant heart conditions or renal or diabetic conditions, and we are going to see a very sad unravelling of what has been a country with equitable access to health services in the past.

So I condemn these moves. It is one thing to say that they were not supposed to be on the agenda of this government. They promised they would not meddle with private health insurance. It has happened. This is the third time it has happened. I am concerned that the budget emergency that this government is now in is placing other elements of the Australian community in jeopardy and those elements include the lower socioeconomic status Australians and those who do not have access to the health services that you find in metropolitan Australia.

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