Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A large fortune to get them onto the market, as the member for Herbert says. Chronic disease conditions that we once just lived with we now treat with surgical correction. For example, the growth in knee and hip replacement surgery has been exponential. Of course we should develop new techniques and new medicines, because this improves the quantity and quality of life for all Australians, and, in many cases, our work benefits the entire world. However, all of this improvement comes at a cost, and that cost never goes down, because once we start fixing one disease or condition another one takes prominence. It is a never ending issue, but one that must be managed.

Between Medicare, aged care and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the Commonwealth processes over $42 billion worth of payment transactions every year. Ten years ago the MBS was costing $8 billion; today it is $20 billion and in 10 years time it will be around $34 billion. In 2013-14, 275 million Medicare services were provided free to the patient. This will cost the taxpayer more than $12.8 billion. In 2013-14, more than four out of five GP services were provided free to the patient, in spite of what those opposite say. That is more than 80 per cent. In 2014-15, Australians accessed more than one million MBS services every single day. This is the first time that this level has been reached in the history of Medicare.

In spite of Labor's scaremongering and hyperventilation, Australia enjoys a high and growing bulk-billing rate. That is how it is. It is Labor's failed management of expenditure growth that has left us where we are today. The coalition is spending more money on health, but it is doing so in a responsible manner by managing and addressing the ever-growing costs. Developing a plan to manage spiralling health costs is a long-term job that requires tough decisions. Labor's plan was simply to spend and ask our children and our grandchildren to foot the bill. They were putting health budget growth on the national credit card. That is exactly what Labor were doing. It is unfair because it asks our children and our grandchildren to pay for the health outcomes of today's generation. That is exactly what those opposite were doing.

When the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, was asked about the debt limit, he responded by saying—as you do—that that will be someone else's problem, just like he would have passed on the current generation's health bill to the next generation. Despite the hysterical allegations—

Opposition members interjecting—

We can hear the caterwauling across the chamber—it would appear that the shadow spokesperson acknowledges the problems, as she did in an interview this year, when she said:

… the opposition would be kidding itself if it didn't recognise there were challenges in the budget and that savings needed to be found …

Those were the comments by the shadow spokesperson, Catherine King, on 22 February 2015. She said:

There is no area that is going to be exempt—

(Time expired)

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