Page 859 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 16 June 1992
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MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Berry puts his head up. I think it is worth making a reference to the next dot point in the Chief Minister's statement, and that is a continued shift from private insurance to public patient status in hospitals. When the Alliance was in government there were many references by the shadow Health Minister to the fact that the Alliance Government had some devious plan to drive patients out of the public hospital system into private hospitals and private health institutions. Whether those plans were supposed to be based on some desire to destroy the public hospital system was never clearly articulated, but we suspect that that is what was imputed to be our motive. Of course, there was no evidence for that in the course of the Alliance Government's record. The Alliance Government proposed to increase public hospital beds in the ACT. It would be very tempting on the basis of public hospital bed numbers to conclude that in fact it is the present Government which is out to destroy public hospitals and public health.
Putting that to one side, we do have a very serious problem in meeting health budget requirements while there is a continuing shift out of private health insurance into public hospitals and publicly funded beds. I forget the figure, but I think in my time it was at least in the order of $350 per day per patient who chose to make the shift from a non-public bed in a public hospital to a public bed in a public hospital. That is a lot of money, and again this Government really cannot afford to ignore the implications of that kind of shift. What is the Government doing to make sure that those in this community who have the money to afford private health care, be it private health care in a public hospital or private health care in a private hospital, are taking that step and making that election? Surely that is the only responsible step to take when your available health dollars in your budget are diminishing, and they are diminishing.
At this stage, I will not go into the problem of a blow-out in the health budget. That is already on the record. But the fact of life is, Madam Speaker, that this budget is not going to make it through another year either without some supplementation in the budget base or some very serious rejigging which results inevitably in the loss of quality of services to the people who use our public hospitals, and it is not necessary. There are people in our public hospital system who frankly should not be there. I would submit, Madam Speaker, that there are easy ways for the Government to stimulate the move away from public hospitals for those people - - -
Mr Connolly: Who is going to decide who should not be there? Do you run around saying, "You, out. You, you and you, out"?
MR HUMPHRIES: The market should decide. You are more sophisticated than that, Mr Connolly, I am sure. The market can decide very easily about that. Give people a valid choice. For example, let the private sector at its own expense build another private hospital in Belconnen. What is wrong with that? It does not cost you a penny and you might just get people choosing to go to that hospital rather than ACT public hospitals. If they do not, there is no skin off your nose. You have not put any money into building those private beds. If someone is committed enough to spend several tens of millions of dollars to build a private hospital, do you not think they have made a conscious, carefully researched decision that they might actually get some patients into their private hospital as a result? Of course they will have done that.
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