Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

You are totally opposed. You have been opposed to private health insurance. You think we should all be members of a government scheme and that individuals should not have access to private health insurance. We think they should have. We in this government have been staunch defenders of the opportunity for Australians to have private health insurance, and we have a commitment to the sale of Medibank Private, which was announced in April this year. At the time of that announcement I reported that one of the many reasons the government should not be owners of Medibank Private was that we believed, based on advice we had in our scoping study, that the efficiency dividend that could be derived from private ownership of Medibank Private would lessen the upward pressure on health insurance premiums. There is no doubt in this country and in any of the civilised world’s democracies that the upward pressure on health insurance premiums is a fact of life. We have inexorable rises in the cost of health care. We have inexorable rises in the cost of medical facilities, in medical procedures and in the technology relating to health. So there is always that upward pressure on private health insurance. As part of the package we announced—