Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kingston for her question and for her ongoing interest in health reforms. The Rudd government’s health budget this year was all about laying the groundwork for reforming our health system: delivering better services to the community, funding new drugs and expanding successful programs but also making programs fairer and more sustainable in the long term. Unfortunately, the opposition do not seem to have made that connection between funding new programs and demanding that existing ones are fair, are delivering to patients and are providing best value for taxpayer dollars. We all know that health dollars are always scarce and, as the Health Reform Commission has said, business as usual is no longer an option. So the limited funding that we have must be targeted to ensure we get the best bang for our buck. The government believes we owe it to taxpayers to ensure that their hard-earned dollars are being used wisely and support goes to those in the community who need it most.

Yet the government’s measures that are doing just that are being blocked by the opposition. Our changes to ensure that patients, not specialists, get the benefits of taxpayer support are being opposed. Our changes that ensure that we are supporting secretaries who want to take out private health insurance rather than supporting the CEOs who expect us to pay for their private health insurance are also being opposed. We do want to adjust the fees that are paid for cataracts to better reflect the time, true cost and complexity of procedures. But the opposition, instead of arguing for the protection of patients or for taxpayers, want to protect ophthalmologists.

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