Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to defend against that fallacious argument. There was no $1 billion ever taken out of the public hospital system or the public health system of Australia by Mr Abbott or anybody else in the coalition government. But, to stay with my point, we have a situation where the federal government have determined that they can withdraw that amount of money and they are hoping that it will not have serious consequences for the quality of the public hospital system in our country.

They have conceded, I suppose, that at least one marble will fall. The government say as a result of their own modelling that 27,000 people will drop their cover as a result of this measure. Let us call that one marble dropping to the bottom of the column. If that were the case, the gamble might have paid off at least partly. But we have among the range of estimates of what will happen if the federal government withdraw that $2.8 billion other much less rosy scenarios or predictions of what will happen. I note that the government's own medical insurer, Medibank Private, estimates that 37,000 of its members alone are likely to drop their cover and a further 92,500 will downgrade their health coverage, most likely by dropping out of hospital cover. Deloitte have done their own work. Their estimate is very sobering. They estimate that in the first year alone of this new scheme 175,000 people would be expected to withdraw from private hospital cover and a further 583,000 will downgrade their cover. Over five years, Deloitte estimate that 1.6 million people will drop cover and 4.3 million will downgrade. As a result, they estimate that private health insurance premiums will rise by 10 per cent above what they would otherwise have risen by. If that turns out to be the case, a lot of marbles are dropping and a lot of serious consequences are flowing down to the public hospital system and the public health system of Australia.