Health Minister Michael Wooldridge was naively optimistic when he said last week that the exodus from private health cover was over. The Private Health Insurance Administration Council announced that 91,000 people dropped their private cover in the three months to June, on top of the 100,000 who left health funds between January and March. The level is now 31.9 per cent of the population compared to 62.8 per cent in 1983.
Dr Wooldridge’s response was, “”So effectively what’s happened today draws a line under the sand of 10 to 15 years of inactivity in private health care,” he said. “”It’s all on from here.”
This is political doublespeak of the kind heard so frequently in the Keating years when bad economic and other news was spun into yarn of completely opposite meaning.
Despite the spin, the fact remains that despite the Government’s huge budgeted investment of $500 million in subsidies to low-income earners to take up or retain private cover, they are leaving it. Moreover, it is probable that they are leaving it in greater numbers than the absolute numbers suggest. This is because account has to be made for a number of high-income earners who have been cajoled into private insurance under threat of a 1 per cent surcharge on the Medicare levy. All the government has done is pay a subsidy to a lot of people who were going to stay in private insurance anyway. It was not a very bright policy.
With an ageing population and more hi-tech in health, the Government is going to have to be more imaginative in attracting more money into the health system — public or private. It must cast ideology out. It may have to increase the levy to a more realistic level and make private cover a more genuine insurance by allowing gap insurance and remitting the levy to those insured provided the funds pay all medical costs, and for the funds to have a greater influence over health costs and quality of care which can be passed on to their clients. The present dislocation of payers, users and providers must end.