Emma Comer (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026 goes to the heart of something every Australian cares deeply about—the ability to access timely, affordable and high-quality health care. It is about trust in our health system, confidence in private health insurance and making sure that, when Australians make decisions about their health, they are not doing so in the dark.

At its core, this legislation delivers on the Albanese government's commitment to strengthen Medicare while ensuring Australians who engage with the private health system are better informed, better protected and better supported. This reform is about giving Australians the information they need and closing the loopholes that undermine confidence in the system. Australians should not need to be health experts or to do hours of research to understand what they're being charged. They should not be left guessing about out-of-pocket costs or whether their insurance policy will actually deliver when they need it most. This bill is about fixing that. It is about enabling Australians to make informed decisions about their health care and their private health insurance.

One of the key reforms in this legislation is improving transparency in healthcare pricing. For too long, patients have faced a system where costs can vary dramatically between specialists for the exact same procedure, often within the same city or region. These variations are not always visible upfront. Patients frequently only discover the true cost after they've already committed to treatment. That is not transparency; that is uncertainty. Uncertainty in health care creates stress, financial pressure and, in some cases, people delaying or avoiding health care altogether. This bill addresses that directly through improvements to the Medical Costs Finder.

The reforms will allow the Medical Costs Finder website to publish individual medical practitioner fees alongside insurer out-of-pocket cost data for common medical services. This is a significant step forward. Importantly, this change doesn't impose new administrative burdens on doctors. Medical practitioners will no longer be required to manually upload billing data. Instead, the system will draw on existing data already collected through Medicare, hospitals and private health insurers, and that is what reform should look like—reducing red tape while increasing—

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