Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

It's a bit rich for the Minister for Health and Aged Care to give Labor a lecture on management when he can't even manage the My Health Record rollout. It has turned into an absolute debacle.

Whichever way one turns under this government, currently led by the member for Wentworth, Australians are paying more and waiting longer for essential health services. Billions of dollars have been cut in funding to our hospitals. Three billion dollars have been cut in the last six years because of the Medicare freeze. There has been a 27 per cent increase in private health insurance costs. It's an atrocious record on health, led by the current Prime Minister; a former Prime Minister; a would-be Prime Minister, the member for Dickson; and a would-be Deputy Prime Minister, the member for Flinders.

With to respect hospitals, $57 billion was cut when this government first came to office. Seven hundred and fifteen million dollars will be cut between 2017 and 2020, and that means a cut of $31 million for the state I represent, South Australia. Between 2019 and 2025 the cut will be $2.8 billion. What does that mean? It means longer waiting times for emergency treatment, longer waiting times for elective surgery and shorter recovery times in hospital for patients. Only on Monday of this week the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser said: 'Frustrated paramedics' stress soars over ramping bottlenecks'. The article refers to three stress related incidents a week across Adelaide's major hospitals because of ramping, where ambos and patients wait for hours in hospital corridors, all because of the cuts to our hospital system.

With respect to private health insurance, there has been a 27 per cent increase under this government. Some 40 per cent of all policies now have exclusions, so people are not only paying nearly $1,000 a year more for their private health insurance but they're actually getting less, and, not surprisingly, more and more people are dropping out of private health insurance because they simply cannot afford it. Then what happens? More and more people end up in our public hospitals because they go there for treatment, or they simply don't take up treatment at all. That in turn means that their health deteriorates and, ultimately, the costs of caring for them escalate.

With respect to the Medicare freeze, GP visits are now up to about $38 on average. For specialists it's $88. In 2016, 1.7 million Australians skipped a specialist visit, another 1.7 million Australians did not fill their pharmaceutical script, one million skipped or avoided a GP visit and 1,830 personal bankruptcies in Australia were attributed to health costs because of this government's cuts. More recently, we saw the AMA put out a survey that showed one in three doctors will cut back or cut out their visits to aged-care centres. Aged-care centres look after some 235,000 Australians every year. If the doctors don't go there, they ultimately end up in the hospital ED departments where it costs even more. That happens at a time when we know more and more people are ending up in aged-care facilities because of our ageing population.

When health costs increase across the country it's the most vulnerable who are hit the hardest, particularly country folk. Country folk are already faced with higher levels of chronic ill-health, a shortage of health professionals and higher costs in accessing the health care they need. These are communities that are already seriously disadvantaged when it comes to healthcare services. This government's tenure has made their access to health care more costly and more difficult, and these are communities that are primarily represented by members of the government.

This is a time when Australia's health needs are greater than ever before. We know dementia rates in this country are rising and it won't be long before about a million people in this country have a dementia related illness. We know mental health issues affect so many people across the country and, again, it's an increasing problem. We know Australians are ageing. We know obesity rates are increasing, with about one in four Australians already obese and nearly two-thirds of Australians overweight.

Our health system needs more support not less. Yet what we're seeing from this government, from one minister after another, is cuts to the health system, passing the buck onto the patient or the states, leading, ultimately, to a deteriorating health service. It is time this government understood that, when it comes to the priorities of the Australian people, health and education are first and foremost. They should respond by supporting the health system of Australia.

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