Health insurance should be unnecessary
Recent reports to the federal health minister have once again raised the perennial problem of Australian politics — health funding. For ideological and self-interested reasons, the debate is unlikely to be resolved in the community's interest.
Proposals put to Carmen Lawrence from Medibank Private (the government-owned health insurer) would allow health funds to charge the chronically ill and elderly far higher premiums for health cover than the young — a user-pays system.
The health insurance industry is getting edgy in the face of a continuing decline in subscribers. The industry, which is not based on benevolence but profit, lost half a million customers last year; the percentage of the population with private health coverage is 37%, down from 68% in 1982. The high cost of insurance, ranging from $70 to $170 a month for the average family, is cited as the main reason for the fall.
But what do private health insurance and the private hospital system offer, and why do they exist at all in a society that has universal health coverage?
The attraction for most people is a guarantee of a more prompt and, in some circumstances, a better service. That over 30% of the population feel it necessary to insure privately is evidence of the Keating government's failure and misplaced priorities in health.
The federal Labor caucus and ACTU working group report which is before the government calls for funding increases for the hospital system, which it suggests should come either from general revenue or through an increase in the Medicare levy. But it too concedes a significant role for private hospitals and the health insurance industry.
Government spending on hospitals continues to be cut. It is this that explains the federal government's desire to arrest the decline in private health insurance; it wants individuals in the community to impose a voluntary levy, a tax, on themselves for health cover.
In the interests of people's health and well-being the federal government needs to:
- Expand the public hospital system to cater for the needs of the community; there should be no reliance on private hospitals, which thrive on vastly inflated charges and therefore push the cost of health care up for the whole community. Further, those who own a disproportionate share of the wealth of this society should be taxed at higher rates to pay for increased spending on the social infrastructure.
- Take effective action against polluters to reduce pollution, which is increasingly a major cause of many preventable diseases and ailments.
- Oppose the vested interests of the conservative medical profession to allow an increased role for forms of alternative medicine.
- Without conceding anything to those who argue for further privatisation of the health system, implement efficiencies in the public health system: a priority here would be eliminating the unnecessary and costly duplication of health administration. The federal government should assume full financial and administrative control over health, with the state health departments being abolished.
No-one in this country should need to take out medical insurance because of deficiencies in the public health system. Health care is a fundamental human right — it should not be the profitable plaything of business.