Page 3878 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
What that has meant, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that there are no incentives for people to maintain the level of private health insurance. Mr Berry, in an interjection in the house earlier today, made the comment that people have seen the quality of Medicare and they are shifting towards it in droves. That is not really a very sustainable argument. Even Mr Berry knows that that is just utter codswallop. The fact of life is that Medicare has had to bear an increasingly large brunt of the cost of health care in this country because the Federal Government's quite deliberate initiatives and other factors have made it increasingly difficult for ordinary Australians to maintain private health insurance. The rises in the cost of private health insurance have been quite horrendous. For example, in 1991 there were increases ranging from 8 per cent for some health funds up to 27 per cent for other health funds around Australia. The overall increase in annual premium costs per family per year in Australia in 1991 was 16.4 per cent. That is a huge increase, a massive increase.
The other reason, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I challenge the argument that people want to go into Medicare because they see the quality in it and discard the private health insurance they have maintained up until now is that you only need to look at our public health system here or anywhere in the country to realise that it is not a system you want to abandon private health insurance to get into. It is a system under serious strain. It is a system with serious problems. For this Minister - who has presided over a massive blow-out in his health budget, a doubling in the size of the hospital waiting list, a dramatic shrinkage in the number of hospital beds he provides and a serious decline in the quality of services in some areas - to sit there and say, "People are coming to Medicare because they like it" really strains the credibility of us and anybody else who happens to listen to this debate.
The rises in premiums, of course, have had serious consequences. They have caused accelerated drop-out rates from private health insurance, and of course that means mainly the fit and healthy who believe that they might survive in straitened circumstances on so-called free Medicare. Fewer and older Australians are maintaining their health insurance because they have to. They have to have the hip replacements when they need them. They have to have the eye operation or whatever it might be. Mr Deputy Speaker, because the old use hospital services at four times the rate of the young and the healthy, health insurance premiums have had to rise commensurately, and so the downward spiral in the number of people with private health insurance continues. That is the nature of the problem we are facing.
Since 1986 two million more Australians are now relying solely on Medicare - that is, they have no health insurance. An extra 250,000 people each year are having to turn to the services of public hospitals instead of being patients in private hospitals, as they might have been previously, or private patients in public hospitals. The cost now runs at about $700m extra per year. That is the nature of the problem we are currently facing in this country. That is why Ministers of Health recently met and negotiated ways of increasing Medicare levies. That is why the Medicare levy each year is covering less and less of the total cost of health care in this country. In 1989-90 the levy covered only 21.3 per cent of health costs. By 1990-91 it covered 19.2 per cent. Last year the figure was down to 17.2 per cent.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .