Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Minister. I really appreciate that because, to be fair, all I have heard in the last few months leading to this package of legislation, which was listed a few weeks ago and now has been re-listed, is that there has been a lack of consultation and a lack of information. There has been a propensity to say, 'Don't worry about what you've got here'—the outline—'we'll give you the details later.' We're standing here today at the start of March. We have started consultation on one part of it that is ongoing. We haven't even started the consultation on another part of the really important detail in regulations and requirements that sit behind the overall operation of the changes that are due to come in on 1 July. Then you tell me that people will have the opportunity for consultation.

I have to say that my feedback so far has been quite significantly that people feel like they haven't been consulted. People feel like they have been railroaded. An example that I used this morning is that the mechanism by which the bundling funding is likely to be delivered appears to have been predetermined by the consultation paper that's gone out, which has three possible scenarios through which the new funding model for the bundling might occur. Clearly, the department has drawn a line underneath it and decided that it wants to do it by facility, despite the fact that the sector has been really clear that it believes that it should be done by procedure. To that end, if the department is so hellbent on the bundling funding model to be decided by facility, has the department done any work to understand how that is likely to affect rural, regional and remote Australia? Medical health facilities in those communities are often challenged by circumstances that are quite different from larger city hospitals. We know that a lot of private health is delivered in rural and regional areas by necessity.

You have said that this consultation process is going to enable the sector to have significant input into the cost recovery framework. Is the department open to consideration of a model that would be based on the procedure that is being undertaken instead of the facility in which it is being undertaken, or has the department already mind up its mind about that? Maybe the department can answer through you, Minister. It does strike me that the department's going out with a preferred recommendation doesn't sound very much to me as though the department is prepared to listen to the sector about what they believe, as the people closest to the coalface, is going to be in the best interest of their ability to deliver for their patients.