Page 3884 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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MRS CARNELL (4.18): Madam Speaker, in the last few days we have heard a lot about the proposed Medicare agreement. There is more than one aspect to this shocking new agreement that Mr Berry has agreed to sign. We have already seen how this agreement will help send ACT Health further into the financial mire. The pockets of ACT taxpayers will be hit with an $8m slug when the Federal Labor Government raises the Medicare levy from 1.25 per cent to 1.4 per cent - an increase, by the way, that will not occur under Fightback. We could at least expect the money being raised to come back to the ACT; but no, Mr Berry is keen to subsidise other States to the tune of many millions of dollars. He has said on radio and in other places that he is quite happy for that subsidy to exist.
There is another aspect of the proposed Medicare agreement that will badly impact on the ACT. This is the negative effect the agreement will have on private health insurance. Private health insurance has a very important role in securing a strong, viable and accessible - I stress that - public health system. Private health insurance contributes $3.4 billion annually to health funding in Australia, which is 11 per cent of the total health bill. It is a little known fact - Mr Kaine brought it up in question time - that this is more than the Medicare levy contributes. The levy currently raises in the order of $2.5 billion, so there is $3.4 billion funding from private health insurance and only $2.5 billion from the levy. That $2.5 billion is only 8 per cent of the total, and without the hefty financial injection that comes from private health insurance we would be in a mess. At the very least, the Medicare levy would have to double. There would not be just a 0.15 per cent increase; the levy would double. This, of course, would hurt low income earners most - those who have the least capacity to pay.
Without the assistance of private health insurance in alleviating public hospital waiting lists, ACT Health would also be in a mess. As an example, on 26 November - just one day, just a snapshot - the ACT's one and only private hospital had 193 staff on duty and 108 patients, and performed 52 operations. Without the private sector, all of these patients would have been on our ever lengthening public waiting list.
Unfortunately, Australia's private hospital insurance system is in a slow but very steady decline. Let us look at the national decline in health insurance. Nationally, 66.9 per cent of the population had private health cover in June 1977. That figure fell to 50 per cent in June 1984, and in every year since the figure has fallen by approximately one per cent. By June this year, only 40.7 per cent of Australia's population were covered. On the basis of these trends, the Australian Health Insurance Association has predicted that by June next year the figure will be 38.5 per cent and by mid-1998 the ratio of privately insured people in the population will have fallen to a tragically low 29.1 per cent. These are the national figures.
We know that the ACT, which has traditionally had a high rate of private insurance, is not immune from these trends. We know that, in 1991, 35.5 per cent of patients admitted to ACT public hospitals were privately insured. By the time of the budget last year, this had fallen to 32.7 per cent, and the September quarter activity report shows that we are now talking about a figure of 29.4 per cent. This indicates that people either are not declaring their insurance status at the point of admission or are dispensing with private health insurance altogether. Either way, the local figures confirm the national trend.
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