Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Barker for his question and his interest in making Medicare sustainable, because that is exactly what this government wants to do. At the moment there are 263 million free services a year on Medicare. So, when people go to the doctor, four out of five of those services are being provided for free at the moment. We want to make sure that Medicare survives and strengthens over the course of the next generation. The reason that we want to do that is not just that we were left an enormous debt by Labor but also that we have an ageing population and we have huge costs—with medical technologies, personalised cancer medicines and all of those which will have to be paid for over the coming decades.

We introduced a modest co-payment in this budget to make Medicare sustainable and to strengthen it for the future. Why? Because we are the best friends that Medicare has ever had. Jenny Macklin was a great friend of Medicare.

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