Page 3880 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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We have heard from the Minister for Health a clear animosity to the maintenance of a private health insurance system in this country. Mr Berry is happy to see more and more patients leave the private system. In fact, he positively encourages it, as indeed does the Prime Minister, who makes the foolish statement that there are people in the private health insurance system who should not be there; they should abandon private health insurance. Frankly, Madam Speaker, I doubt that he has spent much time in a public hospital in this country in recent years. If he had, he would not be saying that.
The fact of life is that we have a system which is under increasing pressure. Short of huge increases in taxes - which the Federal Labor Government says that it does not want, apparently - the only way of relieving that pressure is to find extra money or reduce the number of people who are using the system. Finding extra money is not going to work, because the money is not there; but you can reduce the number of people using the system by encouraging people who can afford to have private health insurance, for example, the people in this chamber at the present time - and I wonder how many of your colleagues have private health insurance, Mr Berry - to take the step of taking out private health insurance and letting those who genuinely need it, who have no other choice, use our increasingly pressed public hospital system. That is social justice. That is applying the principle of equity. That is giving those who most need that access a real chance to get it.
Those four principles of Medicare I referred to - universality, accessibility, equity and simplicity - simply do not hold up very much these days. Perhaps universality does, except when you take out everybody who can afford to and who wants to - and that is quite a lot of the rich in this country - take out private health insurance. Universality does not really matter any more, because we all do not want to use a system which is universal when it offers a low quality of care. The answer is to find some solutions other than the straitjacketed ones which the present local and Federal Labor governments have found. I want to end by quoting the comments of a State Health Minister - not a Liberal Minister, but a Labor Minister - about the approach being taken by the Federal Government. He said:
It's a very unintelligent addressing of the issue and it shows that he -
that is the Federal Minister, Mr Howe -
is ideologically hung up in a way which prevents a commonsense approach.
We have the most inefficient and ramshackle hospital funding system one can imagine.
Madam Speaker, hear, hear!
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (4.03): Madam Speaker, nobody denies that the private health system makes an important contribution to the delivery of health services throughout Australia. I have never denied that. Indeed, it will continue to provide an important part of hospital services throughout this country for a long time. Nobody denies that private health insurance, in conjunction with the private hospital system as well as the public system, provides an important element of health care throughout Australia.
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