Interviews and Transcripts

Absolutely, there’s a number of people on very low incomes who are struggling to maintain their private health insurance and pay their premiums. The government has suggested that 44,000 will drop their cover as a result of this measure and you know we’re worried about that because those people will inevitably go and add to public hospital waiting lists. But perhaps more worrying is the number of people who could downgrade their cover and find that they’re not covered for diseases which are quite common in this age group, like joint replacements, and those people will end up using the public hospital system as well. So we really don’t think that this is the right way for the government to try and make savings. What it’s doing is taking money from people who are taking some responsibility for their own health care and having an impact on the public hospital system where inevitably those people who drop out and downgrade are going to end up.

So Oliver, what the Minister has announced is that an extra rebate which is paid for older Australians will disappear. Now there are 358,000 people with private health insurance who are over 65 in Western Australia, so that’s 358,000 people who will be affected. The cost is going to be really quite substantial. So there’s an extra rebate, which is an extra 4% if you’re between 65 and 69, and an extra 8% if you’re over 70. So from the 1st of April next year, your private health insurance will go up the normal amount. This year there was an average of 4%. Plus an extra eight per cent. So if you’re on a typical silver couples policy and you’re over 70, you’re going to get a 12 per cent whack. If you’ve got a gold policy, they’re increasing at a greater rate, and it’s going to be a 20 per cent whack at more than $1,000 extra. Now, I get the minister’s issues around generational inequity and there are plenty of people over 65 who are quite wealthy. We are really, really worried about people on pensions and people on low incomes who just won’t be able to afford their top cover going forward with it. So we’ve asked the government to look at exempting people on lower incomes.

Now private health insurance isn’t allowed to cover specialists out in the community. We are only allowed to cover specialists in hospital, and we know that doctors in hospitals have increased their out of pocket fees, the bits the patient pay themselves, by 22% over the last three years. That’s an average it’s actually gone up a lot more than that, but we’re seeing in the community stories of people with hundreds of dollars of out of pocket costs, and that’s stopping people getting health care at the moment.

Well, it’s going to be very difficult for those people who are going to be hit right in the hip pocket. So it’s going to affect about 3 million people. And for people aged 65 to 69, it will be at least a 5% extra premium increase. And for people aged over 70, at least an 11% premium increase, which is up to about $700 in addition to the amount that they’re already paying. Now, many of these people have paid for private health insurance over their whole lifetime have barely even claimed and now they’re reaching their 60s and 70s and they need to claim. The rug’s been pulled out from under their feet and we know from the government’s modelling that there’s going to be dropouts but what the government hasn’t said is how many people are going to downgrade their cover because they want to hang on to it but it means they’re not covered for key things that are treated in private hospitals so they’ll go public.

o, we found out about it at roughly the same time that everyone else did during Minister’s Press Club address, predominantly on the NDIS. But then this issue of transferring millions of dollars from older Australians into aged care came up. And that is the issue about reducing the government’s premium assistance to older Australians. So what that means in practice is that people aged 65 to 69 from next year are going to have an extra premium increase of 5%, which will be about $250 for a standard policy. But people aged over 70, it’s going to go up to 11% extra premium, which could be anything from $500 to $700 extra. And in a cost of living crisis where you’ve got people on low annuities, 400,000 aged pensioners have private health insurance. That’s really got to hurt in the hip pocket and it will cause some people to drop out. But my fear is it’s going to cause far more people to downgrade their health insurance.

We are finding more and more Australians are not even getting to the specialist, and we’ve seen people who are delaying treatment or not going. Some people are even choosing which kid they take to the specialist. People are being put in impossible choices. Now, what we’re seeing is really large out of pocket costs for people who are referred from a general practitioner to another medical specialist.

Well, this is a really difficult problem for the Government to fix, but it is something that the private health sector needs to work with the Government on pretty urgently because the community is hurting on this issue. And we’ve really, through our work, we’ve found out that at least one in five people who have been referred to a medical specialist by their GP has not attended because of the cost. And not only is that bad for their health, it’s bad for private hospitals that don’t get patients through people that should be treated, and it’s bad for public hospitals when they turn up in the ED with something badly wrong with them.

Look, the insurers could have doubled what they were paying to the Hobart Clinic, but the hospital would have still failed. So it’s not just a matter of fewer people getting in to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrists themselves have changed how they manage a large number of mental health conditions. A huge amount of this shifted to telehealth, particularly during the pandemic. So it’s actually quite rare these days for someone with a moderate severity mental health condition or addiction to be managed in hospital. And we’re seeing a number actually of psychiatrists on the mainland offering psychiatric care to people in Tasmania via telehealth, and we don’t see any signs that that new clinical model of care, managing someone in the community, is going to change.

Yes, well this is something that’s going to affect 65 per cent of Canberrans, that is people with private health insurance. There’s been this stealthy tax that is on private health insurance, it’s called an ambulance levy although it has nothing to do with ambulances. It’s just a tax on private health insurance premiums that goes into revenue and they decided to put it up without any consultation with our sector. We just found out on budget day and the problem with that is that this is one in a long line of hits to people trying to access private health care in Canberra, including some of the highest doctor’s fees in Australia. So what we’re concerned about is this could really be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for people trying to manage these costs.

Well look, since the pandemic drew to a close, we’ve actually seen quite a marked jump in inflation of doctors’ fees, so that we’re now seeing some quite extraordinary numbers. Like to see a psychiatrist in the community, some are charging over $900 for a first appointment, $600 for a cardiologist or an obstetrician, and some pretty hefty fees even for things like dermatology in the community. Now one thing that is even more worrying than that is that we’re seeing that people are delaying or not pursuing medical specialist referrals because they’re worried about the cost. Between 10 and 20 per cent of people, depending on who you ask, the ABS or one of the universities that studied this, have actually said that, look, they were referred to a specialist for a good reason, but they haven’t gone because they perceive they can’t afford it. The issue for health funds and private health is this is also dampening demand for private hospitals, just as they’ve been beaten up with the pandemic and the lockdowns. So we’re seeing that the number of appointments for a specialist has dropped by 10 per cent even as the population has increased. And our issue from the point of health insurance is we can’t cover- legally we can’t cover the cost of seeing a doctor in their rooms or in the community. The health insurance only kicks in once you’re admitted to hospital.