Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Maybe it was Chinese, Senator Cormann. That is quite possible! Perhaps if we check the Mandarin books we will find that ‘tittle’ means ‘this is a promise that I intend to break later on’.

We have seen broken promises galore in regard to this—broken promises galore, which, as I said before, will hurt every single Australian. How will the broken promises hurt them? They will hurt them in all manner of ways. The Health Insurance Industry Association has made it quite clear in a range of evidence provided to a Senate inquiry into this, and to many Senators as well, that there will be impacts on people.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that private funding contributes to about 57 per cent of all surgery in hospitals. For example, it supports about 55 per cent of procedures for malignant breast conditions, 55 per cent of chemotherapy cancer treatments and 70 per cent of same-day mental health episodes. These are serious conditions. These are serious issues that Australians face. More than half of the treatments in these instances are covered by private health insurers.

When we step beyond this bill, if it is passed, we will see that they are not covered by private health insurance—that Australians will face higher costs to have that health insurance. There will be fewer people in health insurance, therefore there will be more people queuing up in the public system. It will not take much before less than 50 per cent of all surgery in hospitals is covered by private health insurance in some way and before less than 50 per cent of chemotherapy treatments are covered.

Suddenly, this will place enormous extra cost pressures onto the public system. The Health Insurance Industry Association estimates that up to 240,000 Australians with private hospital insurance are likely to exit their cover as a result of the means testing of the 30 per cent rebate. Up to 240,000 Australians! A further 730,000 Australians are likely to downgrade their level of hospital cover, and an additional 775,000 persons will exit their general treatment extras cover as a result of this policy change. Hundreds of thousands—indeed, more than one million Australians—will be reducing their cover in some way, shape or form as a result of this, with all of the flow-on and commensurate impacts that will have for those who are left in the system or for those who never were in the system but were relying on the private health system to make some difference to the public system—to provide those extra legs to the stool.

Many of the nearly 10 million Australians who have private health insurance come from my home state of South Australia. We have one of the older populations in Australia and some of the electorates within South Australia have some of the highest rates of elderly Australians of any of the electorates in Australia. Older people have traditionally clung to their private health insurance through thick and thin. That is why, in fact—contrary to popular belief—so many Australians with private health insurance are on relatively low incomes. Lots of them are retirees and lots of them are pensioners, but they are not game to give up their private health insurance. Who can blame them? State governments everywhere are running the hospitals into the ground.

Let us look at the number of people who would be affected in my home state of South Australia. In the electorate of Wakefield, there are some 44,567 voters with private health insurance, or indeed nearly 63,000 people across the electorate who are covered by that insurance—that is, young people and children who may not be enrolled to vote and others. But what has Mr Champion done to stand up for them? He has done nothing at all. In the electorate of Grey, there are 64,500 people—that is, 47 per cent—covered by private health insurance. I know Mr Ramsey has been fighting hard for those people in his electorate who will be impacted by it.