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

I have to put on record my great concern here. I have a very significant concern. This is no disrespect to IHACPA. They obviously have to cost by taking into account everything that is before them. If they're being asked to price in the cost of administration of a package under the conditions where somebody is having their package managed by a provider, of course, then that's what they're going to do.

But, for anybody who believes that history will do anything differently than what history has done forever, as soon as you give a single price, especially when you're talking about a single price, which is what we're doing—we are saying it is a maximum—history has always shown us that, if a provider of a service is able to charge a price because an independent government authority has set the price of it then there is an expectation that the person providing that service can charge that. We have seen that happen through the NDIS, and we've seen the subsequent challenges occur in terms of a market that has differential pricing depending on who you are.

I think it would've been well advised if the government had perhaps consulted more broadly around the way they've been treating care management caps and how they're treating package management fees. It seems to me here that people who are self-managing are likely to be impacted quite negatively by the change in the way that package management is administered within home care going forward. I'll be very keen, obviously, to see the nationally efficient prices that come out when we see the final determinations from IHACPA, but it is particularly concerning that we have made a decision in the full knowledge that history suggests that people will be charged more for a service than they need to be, simply because the market will move to that cap.

Before we move to the next session today, I want to ask about decision-making around the Commonwealth Home Support Program. We heard earlier this morning about $1.2 billion of IT changes from the government. The first question is: has the government factored in the ICT changes that will be needed to accommodate the likely 800,000 or more people that will be on Commonwealth Home Support Program packages in 2027, or will there be additional ICT changes required to facilitate the changeover from that program to Support at Home?