Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I have made my point. On the one hand, there has been nickel and dining of the 10.7 million Australians. For every $2.60 they put into private health cover to take responsibility for their own health care, the government puts in an additional dollar and says, 'Thank you.'

We are in a nation where if we want to redistribute income, we use a tax system—progressive income and company tax. But when it comes to social services, we deliver to those in need. We deliver health services to the sick, educational services to those who need education and childcare services to those who have children but not to this government. This is about an attack on everyday Australians who pay their way in the tax system and then want to fund their own health care. It is a simple proposal that most nations have moved on with but the fatwa continues on the other side of the chamber.

This is a government that has sought to downgrade the value proposition for caring for your own health care. I can understand there is one story and one narrative in the cities, but let us also remember there are regional Australians who are far away often from healthcare providers and private hospitals. They do not have the same value proposition to keep their private health cover, do they? Instead, we have seen relentless attack that is hitting regional Australians first because they are the ones most likely to drop or downgrade their cover or seek out exclusions so that it remains affordable.

Let us look at the detail of the bill. The one that concerns me greatest is the removal of the 30 per cent rebate from the lifetime health cover component. This is the extra amount one pays for one's private health cover if you do not take it out from the age of 30. That premium is increased by two per cent for every year of life after 30 years of age that you fail to take out private cover—a maximum of a 70 per cent loading—and that can continue for 10 years after you take out the cover.

Let me hypothetically paint a picture for you of a couple that did take it out late in life—five years too late perhaps. They have paid 10 per cent for nine years and now we have the nickel and diming from a government that has never ever trusted someone to fend for themselves and pay for their own private health cover. They are at risk of dropping and downgrading when they are only a few years away from actually having that whole lifetime health cover removed and the premiums becoming more affordable. Let us take another instance: living in a small country town where there are perhaps one or two private providers, no private hospital. So you are paying these large amounts of private health cover but effectively not being able to access as many of the services.

Every time a family makes a tough decision around the kitchen table, the father speaking with the mother about whether to cover the family for another year or so, looking at the increasing private health insurance costs, they are now being slugged by a government that has found every tricky way in the book to make it harder for those families. Those 10.7 million Australians will not forget this. Many of them are low income earners, they are not all the high-flyers. I guess this other side of politics tends to forget that. The first thing that they will do in a conversation across the kitchen table is say, 'How can we keep our private cover to know that we will always have some access to hospital if something calamitous occurs?' The first thing that will drop will be the extras—and that just sounds fine to this government, doesn't it.

That is until you remember that the local private physiotherapist, the local OT and the local pharmacist in town are in many cases supported by people who pay the extra, who have a much higher Medicare safety net and in many cases will only use those private covers if they are insured. Up to 50 to 60 per cent of the work of the local physiotherapist in town is private. They do an amazing service and they reduce the need for country Australians to travel down to the big cities. Once you erode the value proposition for private health that whole exquisite balance that has been achieved over two decades of hard work by governments prior to this one is eroded. People ultimately lose a general practitioner. Let us not forget that. It is the very presence of a general practitioner in town that supports all of the allied health workers around that GP and that is being undermined. Right across this country, the impact of this legislation is for Australians to say, desperately, in an eye-to-eye conversation: 'How can we keep our cover? We've been in it for this long.' The punishment is significant, the uncertainty is incomprehensible if we do not keep our private cover, and you have a government that is doing everything it can to undermine that.

To put it in the simplest possible terms: what we have is a government that came to power in 2007 but in that time has really fixed no problem in the health system. I can make a list of all the challenges the Australian health system faces and, after all these reforms, we still have them today. And that may well be the long-forgotten epitaph that is written when we consider the health performance of this government. Sure it was good at the back-end financial dealings in restructuring our health system, but it never got to the front line to work out what it takes to keep practitioners and providers supported and to keep Australians with private health cover.

I concede that so far the numbers pulling out have not been as high as they could have been—the reason for that is simple: there are significant penalties to pulling out—but watch for the downgrading. The downgrading of cover is something where we cannot trust the modelling that has being done. We do not accept the modelling that has been put together, and I think that even with these changes they are yet to feel them because $1.2 billion was prepaid and none of these people have faced increases in their premiums yet.

But this is a government that does not see more than five minutes into the political future. It is quite happy to make financial commitments for the year 2017, when it is unlikely any of its members will be around, but it does not govern for today. It does not look after today's families, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that it completely forgot health reform through the GFC period. It did not invest a single cent of the stimulus package in health. And now, with its private health cover, in a futile and late attempt to fund a government surplus—

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