Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to remind the House where we are up to in this debate on the government's decision to increase the cost of pharmaceuticals, the cost of medicines, for every Australian. There will be an increase of $5 for general patients and 80c for concession card holders every time they get a prescription at the pharmacist. As well as that, substantial changes to the safety net make it harder and harder for people to reach the safety net, particularly those patients the safety net is designed for—those who have multiple use of medications because they are really, really sick.

We are up to the consideration in detail stage of the bill. Consideration in detail is where a minister is asked questions about a bill and asked to defend why he has taken the decision to construct a bill. The minister has not been in this chamber at all during this debate. I do hope he will be here shortly, because some questions have been raised during consideration in detail that we would like some answers to. The member for Lingiari in particular has asked a question around section 100 and the impact that this bill will have on concessions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are accessing pharmaceuticals through Aboriginal medical services. What will happen to them as a result of this bill? Will Aboriginal medical services be expected to absorb the extra costs arising from this bill? Has money being given to Aboriginal medical services to deal with the extra costs imposed on them by this bill, or will individual patients have to pay? It is a very serious question, and the minister needs to answer it.

We are opposing this bill because, in the entire context of what the government are doing, it is transferring costs onto patients—and I will talk a bit about why they are intending to do that. We also asked whether any modelling has been done of the impact on people taking their medications. It is clear that the government have worked out that a certain number of people will not fill scripts for their medications. We want to know what that number is. How many people are they expecting not to fill their prescriptions and what is the impact of that overall on people's health? For example, how many scripts does the average pensioner fill? How many scripts does someone with a health care card on average fill? How much more will it cost per year for the average pensioner before they reach the safety net? How much more will it cost per year for the average health care card holder before they reach the safety net? What will the cost per script be by July 2018, when the safety net is at 68 scripts? Can the government guarantee that the safety net will be capped for 2018 at 68? They cannot guarantee it. They have said in the bill that the increases will stop there, but we are not certain about that at all. In fact, I do not trust this government one iota when it comes to health. So we want to guarantee that that is actually the case. What will the safety net be for general patients by July 2018, after it increases by 10 per cent plus CPI every single year? And is this it when it comes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme? We know the government are trying to run a false argument about the measures in this bill being about the sustainability of the PBS. The only way they can genuinely be about the sustainability of the PBS is if the government are expecting people not to fill the scripts they are supposed to fill when they go to the doctor and are told, 'You need this medicine.' Not a dollar of this is going back into the PBS.

The question I have the minister is: how many new medicines that are currently coming through the PBAC pipeline—we have Kalydeco being used as an example in this debate—will now be listed out of this $1.3 billion? And what are they? We pretty much know that the answer to that is going to be absolutely zero, so it is not about the sustainability of the PBS. This is about a revenue-raising measure to transfer costs onto patients and to deal with the budget. (Time expired)

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