Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (12:46): I too rise to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. Let me say right from the outset that the coalition absolutely supports transparency in health care. We support it because we believe in it and because we built the very tool this bill is seeking to expand.

It was the coalition that established the Medical Costs Finder back in 2019 so Australians could go online and get a sense of what they might pay before they walked into a specialist room. So, when the government says it wants more transparency for patients, it will find no argument from us on that principle. The coalition will not oppose this bill.

But supporting transparency in principle is not the same as accepting that this bill, as drafted, gets it entirely right, because it doesn't. And we are not alone in saying so. The committee heard it, the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills flagged it, and stakeholders have raised it.

Let's be clear about why this matters to ordinary Australians. Out-of-pocket costs in this country have reached record highs. For a visit to a medical specialist, just 28 per cent of services are bulk-billed and the average out-of-pocket cost is more than $123.

For anaesthetics, fewer than nine per cent are bulk-billed and the average gap is almost $245. It gets worse. Research by Redbridge found that around 30 per cent of Australians referred to a specialist over the past three years did not go, because they were worried about what it was going to cost them.

Think about that. Almost a third of people told by their own GP that they needed to see a specialist decided that they could not afford to find out what was wrong with them. That is the human cost of a system where prices are hidden and costs keep climbing.

And the variation is extraordinary. Data from Cleanbill shows that, in the very same local area, GP fees can vary by up to 133 per cent and dermatologist fees by up to 93 per cent—the same suburb, the same service and the patient has no way of knowing whether they are paying a fair price or twice the going rate. So, yes, transparency can help but only if it is done properly.

If you're going to put prices in front of patients, those prices have to be accurate, they have to be fair, and they have to actually help someone make the decision. As it stands, this bill falls short on all three of those things. That is why the coalition will move a series of sensible, practical amendments.

The first and, to my mind, the most important, goes to whether this website will actually be useful to the person sitting at their kitchen table who is trying to use it. As drafted, the bill could see a single figure published next to a service, but a single number can be incredibly misleading. So the coalition will move to require that Medical Costs Finder displays proper context—the median fee and the typical range of fees for a given service.

A patient does not just need to know what one doctor charges. They need to know whether that price is at the low end, the high end or right in the middle. Give people the range, and you give them the power to ask the one question every consumer is entitled to ask: am I being charged a fair price?

The second amendment goes to accuracy and fairness. This website will draw on government billing data and publish information about individual clinicians. Inevitably, some of that information will be wrong.

The question is: what happens when the information is wrong? Under this bill, the answer is simply not good enough. The coalition will move to require that, when information about a clinician is disputed and subject to review, it must come down off the website immediately and stay down until that review has been completed, not left up there for weeks or months quietly misleading patients and unfairly tarnishing a doctor's reputation.

If the data is under a cloud, it should come down and it should be checked for accuracy. That is basic fairness, and it's exactly what stakeholders, including medical colleges, have been asking for. The third amendment makes transparency an ongoing commitment, not a one-off press release.

The coalition will move to require the minister to publish an annual report on what this data is actually telling us—the trends in the median prices and the variation between regions. Australians have a right to know whether out-of-pocket costs are going up or going down, and they have a right to know whether, in this country, your postcode is deciding what you pay for your healthcare.

Sunlight should not be switched off the day after the minister's media release has been written. My fourth point goes to the second half of the bill, the premiums. The government says it wants to stamp out product phoenixing, where an insurer quietly closes a product and reopens an almost identical one at a higher price.

That is a worthy goal, and we support it, but the drafting goes well beyond that. As written, an insurer would need the minister's approval to launch any new product at all, with no cap on the fees that can be charged to apply and no deadline for the minister to actually decide. The coalition will move two practical fixes.

First, cap those application fees to the genuine cost of processing them. This is a concern of the scrutiny of bills committee as well. Second, give the minister 30 days to make a decision, with approval deemed to be granted if he sits on his hands and doesn't respond in that timeframe.

The last thing Australians need is a fix for phoenixing that becomes a handbrake on choice and yet another cost quietly passed back to them through their premiums. Let us not pretend that a website is a substitute for action on the cost of healthcare under this government. This is a government that has presided over a private health premium increase of 4.41 per cent, the largest in eight years and above the rate of inflation.

This is a government under which Australians are, for the first time in Medicare's history, paying more than $50 on average for out-of-pocket costs just to see their GP. This is the same Labor Party that cut the private health insurance rebate, a decision that continues to push up the cost of cover for millions of families to this very day. It is the same Labor Party whose health minister once said in as many words that she paid for the government's promises by targeting health insurance.

So, as I said, transparency is welcome, but transparency about a rising bill does not make the bill any smaller. Australians do not just want to see the costs. They want a government that actually does something about it.

So let me be clear about where the coalition stands. We will not stand in the way of this bill. We support genuine transparency, and we always have.

But we will move amendments to make the scheme accurate, fair and genuinely useful for the patient and to make sure a sensible fix on premiums doesn't become just another cost passed on to consumers. I commend our amendments to the Senate and I urge the government and the crossbench to support them, because Australians deserve nothing less than a transparency scheme that actually works.