The private-health-insurance statistices are becoming a little like the current account deficit figures — a depressing figure month after month. The difference, though, is that the Federal Goverment can do a lot more about health insurance than the current account. It has huge constitutional and fiancial powers over the health system, but month after month the drift from private health continues. The latest figures show that only 31.1 per cent of people covered. It means that less money is coming into the system and fewer people are willing or capable of looking after themselves.
bn intern atetc govt can do something about it.
The Government’s incentive scheme has utterly failed. Even taking the glossy put on it by the health-insurance industry at face value, the subsidies for low-income earners and penalties for high income earners have together kept only 200,000 in private insurance at a cost (according to the Budget) of $500 million a year. For heavens sake, for that money the Government could have pulled a million names out of the phone book and given them private insurance and been 800,000 premiums ahead. It was an indefensible and moronic piece of govenment policy that anyone with a modicum of knowledge about health insurance knew was doomed before it was introduced. That money should be given straight to public hospitals.
Root causes have to be addressed. The gap must be attacked. Funds must be able to offer gap-free insurance in return for some bulk contracting of doctors and hospitals while leaving pateints the choice to go where they want if they are prepared to pay a gap. Community rating must go so that much cheaper policies can be given to younger and healthier people. Some of these thigns have been addressed in a piecemeal way, but obviously not enough.
Australia’s public and private health systems are still good by world standards, but must the government so culpably watch them decline.