Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Dunkley for her contribution and all members for their contributions to the debate on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026.

Schedule 1 of this bill makes important changes to support greater transparency in healthcare pricing, which will help Australians make more informed decisions about their private healthcare choices. It does that by providing consumers with more detailed information on the medical fees that they can expect to be charged and their likely out-of-pocket costs for their private health experience. Currently, consumers have more information about routine goods and services in the community than they do about healthcare choices, choices that can have a profound impact on their quality of life but also on their finances. Without passage of this schedule, we would continue to see many Australians simply not knowing what their private healthcare journey was going to cost until they were in it. Right now, they're unable to easily compare the costs of alternative providers and therefore unable to make an informed choice about their healthcare.

Schedule 2 strengthens ministerial oversight of private health insurance premiums, ensuring that consumer interests are better protected. Allowing insurers to close an existing product and open an identical or very similar new product at a higher premium without ministerial scrutiny presents an unacceptable risk to private health insurance customers and needs to be stopped. This practice, commonly known as phoenixing, is something that I warned insurers about over some period of time. I indicated to them that, if I didn't see a cessation of that practice by the industry itself, we would do exactly what we are doing now, and that is legislate. This will be achieved by requiring ministerial approval not just for proposed premium changes, which happens with the premium round every year—it will also be required when an insurer proposes to open a new product or reduce a certain coverage, benefits or terms and conditions of an existing product.

Changes are also being made to formalise and enhance the process for the approval of premiums. The arrangements are substantially aligned with how the annual premium round has been managed over recent years. I want to thank the member for Kooyong for her contributions to this debate in particular and for her commitment to holding specialists to account over the fees that they charge patients. The first part of this bill, not the phoenixing part but the first part around informed consent, is essentially the implementation of an election commitment we made last year. That was to make the Medical Costs Finder effectively mandatory.

To his credit, my predecessor Greg Hunt introduced the Medical Costs Finder with the ambition of providing consumers with the information about what medical specialists in their community would charge for particular procedures. He did that on a voluntary basis, expecting that specialists would upload and disclose the fees that they were going to charge. When we came to government in 2022, of the thousands and thousands of specialists covered by the Medical Costs Finder, six had uploaded their fees—not 600 or even six per cent, just six of the thousands and thousands covered. Even after the AMA—

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