Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

I'm faced today with a pretty monumental task, trying to condense five years of government failures on Medicare into a single 10-minute speech. I could very easily spend 10 minutes just on their disastrous six-year Medicare freeze, which has ripped billions of dollars out of Medicare and forced up the cost of health care for all Australians, a freeze that continues in part today. I could spend 10 minutes on the infamous 2014 budget, where they sought to run a wrecking ball through our universal health insurance scheme by making everyone pay more to see the doctor, or on their attempts to dismantle bulk-billing incentives or to privatise the Medicare payments system. And that's not even to mention their overblown claims about daily PBS listings or their savage ongoing cuts to hospitals, including their new retrospective cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars for public hospitals. I could definitely spend 10 minutes just talking about their five years of failure when it comes to Medicare-licensed MRI machines. Yes, they've finally acted on that now, after pretty much copying Labor's policy. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Minister, so thank you very much.

Alas, I don't actually have an hour; I have just 10 minutes, so I'll do my best. Labor, as everyone knows, is the party of Medicare. We invented it, and we will always protect it. It is the heart and soul of our healthcare system, and it is the envy of countries around the world. More than 20 million Australians access Medicare services every year. It is without doubt one of the most important programs that the Commonwealth government delivers. It's fundamental not just to our health system but to our economy and the very fabric of our modern society. It took two Labor governments more than two decades to shape and embed the Medicare that we know today.

Many Australians take Medicare for granted, and I wish they could take it for granted, because, in the Labor Party, we believe Australians should be able to rely on Medicare wherever they need it, without worry, without a second thought. But the Australian people cannot take Medicare for granted, because, every single time the conservatives get into power, they start to look at creative ways to dismantle it. Remember the $7 co-payment from just a few years ago? That was an unprecedented attack on the universality and accessibility of Medicare, effectively ending bulk-billing. It was a policy that would have forced up the cost of seeing a GP and the cost of hospital pathology and X-rays.

The minister likes to pretend that all things just started with him. You've got history in the party on the government benches in what you've done to Medicare, so you need, in your address, to actually address what you've done since 2014: cut after cut after cut. The co-payment that was in that budget wasn't just targeted at the wealthy or well off; it was everyone, including children and pensioners, the chronically ill and the poorest, most disadvantaged people in our nation. The Liberals wanted to use this co-payment as a price signal to deter going to the doctor. That is what they said was exactly what they wanted to do. Can you believe it? Their health policy at the time revolved around deterring people from actually seeking health care.

Of course, we know that the people who don't go to the doctor typically get sicker and sicker and end up costing the health system more. So the conservative prescription was to make people sicker and end up spending more on the health system in the long run—absolute genius. It was Labor, it was the parliament and it was the Australian people who ultimately stopped this government going down that road. As is so often the case, we helped save the government from themselves, but the plan revealed what was actually in their hearts. And when they couldn't get that plan through, they resorted to extending the freeze on Medicare rebates. Again, under intense pressure from Labor, doctors and the public, the minister announced a gradual thaw in the six-year freeze in May 2017, but he still hasn't actually lifted it all today. Many elements will still remain up until 2020. That is six years of slugging doctors and ultimately patients, simply because they won't want to access our health care.

I recently visited the Gold Coast and met with Professor John Corbett. After providing bulk-billed specialist EEG services for over 20 years, John Corbett has recently been forced to cease providing these services because of the government's ongoing freeze. That means higher costs for patients, and this sort of thing is happening all over the country. The rebate freeze has ripped $3 billion out of Medicare, and the Liberals are still banking savings from those cuts today. That's $3 billion ripped out of the pockets of patients.

A couple of months ago, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare finally laid bare the full extent of the health affordability crisis in Australia—a crisis inflicted by this government. The report showed that Australians are spending nearly $30 billion on out-of-pocket health expenses a year. That includes $3 billion a year on nonhospital Medicare-subsidised services. Half of all patients have incurred out-of-pocket costs to see a GP or a specialist or have blood tests, X-rays or other scans. Seventy per cent of patients seeing specialists made some out-of-pocket payment, and more than a million people spent $600 or more on medical gap fees. As a result of these costs, 1.3 million people are either delaying or skipping seeing a doctor or getting a test when they need it, putting their wellbeing and their lives at risk.

The AIHW report also exposed this minister's claims about bulk-billing. The data shows that only 66 per cent of patients are bulk-billed by their GP, a far cry from the 86 per cent figure the minister trots out on a daily basis. The Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association confirmed that the figures cited by the minister are in fact misleading. That's a nice way of saying they're a complete con job and totally meaningless. You cannot trust this minister. Malcolm Turnbull couldn't trust this minister. This minister lined up in this place to profess support for the former Prime Minister, all the way working with the member for Dickson to tear him down. And how well did that work out for the minister? Remind me—is the member for Dickson the Prime Minister? And how many votes did the minister actually get for the deputy job? I think it was 16. His colleagues can't trust him and neither can the Australian people.

It's the same when it comes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Every other day the minister tries to trumpet this government's record when it comes to listing new medicines. It's basically all that he talks about nowadays, probably because their achievements elsewhere in the health portfolio are so evidently lacking. But, when he does, he so conveniently forgets to mention that it was his government, in fact, that tried to increase the co-payment, which would have forced up the cost of PBS medicines by up to $5, including for vulnerable pensioners.

Despite all the government's cuts and failures, they still make the remarkable claim that Medicare has never been stronger and that their commitment is rock solid. But you can't judge them on what they say. You have to, of course, judge them on what they do, and their record is an appalling one. In Senate estimates earlier this year, officials said that the government's 2018 budget—and this is the government officials—was trying to bend the cost curve of Medicare. That's the government's fancy new way of saying 'a cut'. The government also wants to bend the Medicare cost curve until it actually breaks.

The government has also now broken an election promise—another one. In the election campaign they gave an unequivocal commitment that every element of Medicare services would continue to be delivered by the government. That is the commitment the then Prime Minister gave. They gave that commitment after they got the scare of their lives as we were fighting so hard against their privatisation agenda—the agenda to privatise the Medicare payments system, which is what you were doing. You are now trying to do it by stealth. We understand, as exposed by the member for Chifley, that 12 contract staff are set to administer Medicare payments for the first time in Hobart. It is the start, again, of the privatisation of Medicare—the privatisation of the Medicare payments system, bringing in contractors for the first time.

You bet we're going to absolutely highlight your hypocrisy. You're trying to do it absolutely again. This is a government that has fought and hated Medicare every single step of the way. They dream of an Americanised health care system where every man, woman and child should care for themselves, where people die or suffer for years because they cannot afford a doctor and cannot afford to go to a hospital. This is their vision for Medicare, a two tiered system—opposed all the way, every day, by Labor.

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