PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr WILLCOX (Dawson) (12:15): For an older Australian living on a fixed income, the family budget is already a balancing act. Under Labor, the grocery bill has increased, the electricity bill has gone through the roof and now Labor wants to make private health insurance more expensive. There is nothing fair about asking older Australians to choose between health cover that they rely on and other essentials that they need to live.
One older Australian put it perfectly: 'We can't afford health insurance, but we cannot afford to be without it.' That is a choice that Labor is forcing older Australians to make. From April next year, more than three million Australians aged over 65 will lose their higher private health insurance rebate. For some, the increase will be more than $800 a year for a single person or more than $1,600 for a couple.
The Minister for Health and Ageing says it was a hard decision. I'll tell you what is a hard decision: it is pensioners choosing whether to keep their health insurance or cut back on their groceries, choosing between turning on the aircon on a sweltering day or keeping health cover. It won't be the health minister that is making these decisions.
It will be a pensioner looking at the electricity bill, the grocery bill and the insurance bill, trying to work out which one can wait. Here the Labor government's argument completely unravels. The government says around 44,000 people will leave private health insurance.
The ministers described the impact as very minimal. But National Seniors Australia surveyed more than 2,000 older Australians. They found that 8.4 per cent were considering dropping their hospital cover, while another 12.5 per cent were considering reducing it.
If these results were reflected across the wider population, National Seniors estimates that up to 270,000 people could drop their hospital cover and another 400,000 people could downgrade it. This is a serious warning for the health system, and that is why the government needs to release the modelling. Labor has got the numbers wrong.
The cost of health cover does not disappear. It moves from private health cover to public health cover that is already overstretched. It moves from an insurance premium to a taxpayer funded waiting list.
Private Healthcare Australia has warned that these changes could threaten the viability of some regional private hospitals which care for a large number of over Australians. For regional Australia, it could mean travelling hundreds of kilometres from home to access treatment. In Dawson, we know what regional health care looks like.
When the service you want to receive isn't available locally. You have to travel to Mackay, to Townsville, to Brisbane. In regional Australia, that can mean hours of travel, greater expense and longer waiting times.
The government says it is saving around $3 billion over four years, but that saving for government becomes a cost to the healthcare system. What happens if more people downgrade their cover? What happens if regional private hospitals lose viability?
What happens when those patients arrive in the public system? You cannot solve a health system capacity problem by simply moving patients from one waiting room to another. That is a fundamental flaw.
Private health insurance is not simply a subsidy on an individual bill; it is part of the architecture of the Australian health system. Every Australian who maintains private health cover helps to maintain capacity outside of the public system. If the government wants to change the rebate, it owes Australians more than a line in the budget.
It owes them the numbers. It owes them the transparent modelling of how many people will leave or downgrade and what happens to private and public hospitals. Australians deserve a health policy that adds capacity, not shifts pressure.
Older Australians deserve better than being told aged care must be funded by making existing health care more expensive. Labor should not cut the rebate and pretend it has cut the cost of health care. The need for health care remains.
The patients remain, and the cost remains. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.