Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the coalition to say that we rejected the two surcharge bills and we will be opposing the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2009 [No. 2] as well. I am going to start by stating a number of facts. There are over 9.5 million Australians with hospital cover through private health insurance. That is 45 per cent of the population. Over 11 million people in this country have some form of private health cover. This piece of legislation will affect every single one of those 11 million people. Around 1.3 million people with insurance are over 65 years of age, which is 50.3 per cent of all Australians in this age group. Members of health funds contributed $10.6 billion to the Australian healthcare system in 2008, an increase of 10 per cent on the previous year. Around 56 per cent of all surgical procedures are performed in private hospitals, and most of these are covered by private health insurance and 15 per cent of public hospital admissions are privately insured patients. Those are the facts.

As Senator Cormann and other speakers have said, of all Labor’s broken promises this is probably one of the greatest. Broken health promises have overtaken the so-called greatest moral dilemma of our time. The government is now putting health on the agenda because it does not want us to be talking about that.