I rise to support the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. Australians can compare the prices of flights, hotel rooms or household appliances in a matter of minutes, but, when a GP refers someone to a specialist, finding out what that care is likely to cost can be harder. That is not a small problem. In 2024-25, more than 800,000 Australians delayed or missed specialist care because of cost. A 2025 Grattan Institute report found that average out-of-pocket costs for specialist attendance had risen by 73 per cent in real terms since 2010, with the average out-of-pocket costs for those who paid a bill reaching $300 in 2023. When somebody is worried about their health, they should not always have to navigate a system where the price is unclear until the bill arrives. That's what this bill is about—more information, more transparency and more protection for consumers.

Schedule 1 deals with transparency. The Medical Costs Finder was supposed to help Australians understand the likely costs of specialist care, but the voluntary model simply did not work. The former government spent $24 million establishing the website. By the end of 2022, of around 6,300 eligible specialists in the 11 specialist specialities included at the time, just six doctors had chosen to display their fee information. Even three years later, only around 88 doctors were voluntarily displaying their fees. This is not meaningful transparency. This bill fixes that problem by allowing information already held by government through Medicare, hospitals and private health insurers to be published through the Medical Costs Finder. That can include information about individual medical practitioners, the fees they charge, where they practice, relevant Medicare benefits, and the likely out-of-pocket costs for patients. Importantly, medical practitioners will not have to manually upload this information. The system will draw on administrative data already collected. Equally importantly, patient privacy is protected. No patient information will be published.

The principle here is straightforward. If people are expected to make choices about their health care, they need useful information on which to base these choices. Fees can vary significantly between specialists, between practitioners and between locations. For a Tasmanian considering specialist treatment, being able to see where a practitioner works, what they generally charge and what the likely gap might be gives them a clearer indication of the costs before they make that decision. It will not make every specialist consultation cheap, but it gives patients information they have not had before, and that gives them more power to ask questions, compare options and make an informed decision.

Schedule 2 deals with another consumer issue, product phoenixing in private health insurance. Product phoenixing is where an insurer closes an existing product and then opens an identical or very similar product at a higher premium or makes changes that reduce the value of the cover without the normal level of ministerial scrutiny. People who pay for private health insurance are entitled to confidence that the product that they are buying represents fair value and that the rules cannot simply be worked around. This bill closes that loophole. Private health insurers will be required to seek ministerial approval for premiums on proposed new products and, where certain changes are made to existing products that reduce cover, benefits or the value of terms and conditions. In other words, an insurer should not be able to avoid scrutiny simply by giving essentially the same product a new name or reshaping it in a way that leaves consumers worse off. The bill also puts the annual premium approval process on a clearer legislative footing. These measures have been welcomed by consumer organisations, and both the Australian Medical Association and Private Healthcare Australia have supported the broad direction of the legislation. This is another part of the Albanese Labor government's broader work to make health care more affordable, accessible and fair.

For Labor, health is not an optional extra. It's one of the central responsibilities of government. We built Medicare, and we are strengthening it. We have made the biggest investment in Medicare in its history. We have expanded bulk-billing incentives. We have established Medicare urgent care clinics so Australians can receive fully bulk-billed urgent care without having to go to a hospital emergency department. We have also delivered the largest cut to the maximum cost of a general PBS script in the history of the scheme. The maximum price has fallen from $42.50 in 2022 to $25, while the concessional co-payment is frozen at $7.70 until 2030. These things matter because health is also a cost-of-living issue. A family budget does not distinguish between the grocery bills, the power bill, the cost of a prescription and the cost of seeing a doctor or specialist. They all come out of the same household income. That is why our approach to health has been practical: make GP care more affordable, make medicines cheaper, provide more free urgent care, strengthen Medicare, and, through this bill, make sure people have better information about specialist costs and stronger protections when they pay for private health insurance.

Medicare remains the foundation of our health system, but many Australians also use private health insurance and private specialist care, and they deserve a system that is clear and fair. Strengthening Medicare is not only about what happens when somebody walks into a GP clinic. It's also about making the wider health system easier to navigate and ensuring patients are treated with respect when they move between primary care, specialist care, hospitals and private insurance.

This bill delivers two election commitments: it delivers greater transparency on patient medical fees, and it outlaws product phoenixing. Both changes put consumers in a stronger position. Australians should be able to know more about what their care is likely to cost before they receive the bill, they should be able to compare their options, and people paying for private health insurance should know that insurers cannot sidestep the normal scrutiny of premium changes by repackaging products. This is practical health reform. It is about transparency, affordability and fairness. It's another step in the Albanese Labor government's work to strengthen Medicare and make our health system work better for Australians. I commend the bill to the Senate.

I too rise to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. Let me say right from the outset that the coalition absolutely supports transparency in health care. We support it because we believe in it and because we built the very tool this bill is seeking to expand. It was the coalition that established the Medical Costs Finder back in 2019 so Australians could go online and get a sense of what they might pay before they walked into a specialist room. So, when the government says it wants more transparency for patients, it will find no argument from us on that principle. The coalition will not oppose this bill.

But supporting transparency in principle is not the same as accepting that this bill, as drafted, gets it entirely right, because it doesn't. And we are not alone in saying so. The committee heard it, the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills flagged it, and stakeholders have raised it.

Let's be clear about why this matters to ordinary Australians. Out-of-pocket costs in this country have reached record highs. For a visit to a medical specialist, just 28 per cent of services are bulk-billed and the average out-of-pocket cost is more than $123. For anaesthetics, fewer than nine per cent are bulk-billed and the average gap is almost $245.

It gets worse. Research by Redbridge found that around 30 per cent of Australians referred to a specialist over the past three years did not go, because they were worried about what it was going to cost them. Think about that. Almost a third of people told by their own GP that they needed to see a specialist decided that they could not afford to find out what was wrong with them. That is the human cost of a system where prices are hidden and costs keep climbing.

And the variation is extraordinary. Data from Cleanbill shows that, in the very same local area, GP fees can vary by up to 133 per cent and dermatologist fees by up to 93 per cent—the same suburb, the same service and the patient has no way of knowing whether they are paying a fair price or twice the going rate. So, yes, transparency can help but only if it is done properly.

If you're going to put prices in front of patients, those prices have to be accurate, they have to be fair, and they have to actually help someone make the decision. As it stands, this bill falls short on all three of those things. That is why the coalition will move a series of sensible, practical amendments. The first and, to my mind, the most important, goes to whether this website will actually be useful to the person sitting at their kitchen table who is trying to use it. As drafted, the bill could see a single figure published next to a service, but a single number can be incredibly misleading. So the coalition will move to require that Medical Costs Finder displays proper context—the median fee and the typical range of fees for a given service. A patient does not just need to know what one doctor charges. They need to know whether that price is at the low end, the high end or right in the middle. Give people the range, and you give them the power to ask the one question every consumer is entitled to ask: am I being charged a fair price?

The second amendment goes to accuracy and fairness. This website will draw on government billing data and publish information about individual clinicians. Inevitably, some of that information will be wrong. The question is: what happens when the information is wrong? Under this bill, the answer is simply not good enough. The coalition will move to require that, when information about a clinician is disputed and subject to review, it must come down off the website immediately and stay down until that review has been completed, not left up there for weeks or months quietly misleading patients and unfairly tarnishing a doctor's reputation. If the data is under a cloud, it should come down and it should be checked for accuracy. That is basic fairness, and it's exactly what stakeholders, including medical colleges, have been asking for.

The third amendment makes transparency an ongoing commitment, not a one-off press release. The coalition will move to require the minister to publish an annual report on what this data is actually telling us—the trends in the median prices and the variation between regions. Australians have a right to know whether out-of-pocket costs are going up or going down, and they have a right to know whether, in this country, your postcode is deciding what you pay for your healthcare. Sunlight should not be switched off the day after the minister's media release has been written.

My fourth point goes to the second half of the bill, the premiums. The government says it wants to stamp out product phoenixing, where an insurer quietly closes a product and reopens an almost identical one at a higher price. That is a worthy goal, and we support it, but the drafting goes well beyond that. As written, an insurer would need the minister's approval to launch any new product at all, with no cap on the fees that can be charged to apply and no deadline for the minister to actually decide. The coalition will move two practical fixes. First, cap those application fees to the genuine cost of processing them. This is a concern of the scrutiny of bills committee as well. Second, give the minister 30 days to make a decision, with approval deemed to be granted if he sits on his hands and doesn't respond in that timeframe. The last thing Australians need is a fix for phoenixing that becomes a handbrake on choice and yet another cost quietly passed back to them through their premiums.

Let us not pretend that a website is a substitute for action on the cost of healthcare under this government. This is a government that has presided over a private health premium increase of 4.41 per cent, the largest in eight years and above the rate of inflation. This is a government under which Australians are, for the first time in Medicare's history, paying more than $50 on average for out-of-pocket costs just to see their GP. This is the same Labor Party that cut the private health insurance rebate, a decision that continues to push up the cost of cover for millions of families to this very day. It is the same Labor Party whose health minister once said in as many words that she paid for the government's promises by targeting health insurance.

So, as I said, transparency is welcome, but transparency about a rising bill does not make the bill any smaller. Australians do not just want to see the costs. They want a government that actually does something about it. So let me be clear about where the coalition stands. We will not stand in the way of this bill. We support genuine transparency, and we always have. But we will move amendments to make the scheme accurate, fair and genuinely useful for the patient and to make sure a sensible fix on premiums doesn't become just another cost passed on to consumers.

I commend our amendments to the Senate and I urge the government and the crossbench to support them, because Australians deserve nothing less than a transparency scheme that actually works.

I rise to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. Australians have been approaching their medical specialist care with trepidation. They are fearful of bill shock, burnt by highly variable out-of-pocket fees that are declared too late in the patient journey, often once the therapeutic alliance between doctor and patient has been forged. The effect has been an erosion of confidence in the private health system and, worse still, delayed care, because the current financial consent process is not working for them. This is exposing Australians to financial toxicity when they see medical specialists for care. Let's take a knee replacement. Private Healthcare Australia has the median fee for that operation last year at $1,080, but one in 10 patients was charged more than $5,300, nearly five times that price.

So what does that uncertainty actually do? The ABS Patient Experiences survey found that more than 1.9 million Australians delayed or did not see a specialist due to cost in 2024-25. The increase in specialist out-of-pocket costs over recent years has outpaced general price growth. For example, the average out-of-pocket cost for an initial specialist consultation went from around $94 in 2016, 10 years ago, to $158 in 2025, a 67 per cent increase. By comparison, the CPI or inflation rose by 32 per cent over the same time.

Specialists will argue that their costs have increased over time, and they have, due to a number of factors: rent on rooms; consumables; equipment; staff wages; medical indemnity, which tends to track with litigation across the entire medical profession; and income protection—to name a few. They may also argue that the Medicare rebate is insufficient for some procedures, such as complex surgeries that may sometimes take between eight and 10 hours at a time. I can think of several, such as a AAA repair. That is when an aortic aneurysm is repaired. It is very long surgery. Ivor Lewis oesophagectomy is usually surgery for cancer of the oesophagus. It is a major operation. And there are types of reconstructive surgery, such as head and neck, or even other types, to name a few. They are usually for cancer.

The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing released its consultation paper on specialist affordability, and the numbers in it are telling. On six million occasions, Australians were charged between three and five times the benchmark fee to see a specialist. But on 1.24 million occasions last year, Australians were charged more than five times the benchmark fee. Out-of-hospital out-of-pocket costs have jumped by roughly 67 per cent since 2019. I want to be clear that excessive out-of-pocket fees are confined to a very small minority of specialists. The vast majority are doing the right thing. Providers recognise their ethical obligation to ensure the fees they charge are reasonable. This is shared by the AMA, who have stated that they do not support egregious charges—fees that the majority of practitioners would consider unacceptable. However, existing guardrails like professional standards and frameworks and, indeed, peer review and peer pressure for ethical billing are not preventing this behaviour.

The risk here is that excessive out-of-pocket fees can become normalised, driving up fees across the entire market. A Consumers Health Forum survey released in February found consumer fees were the single biggest cost worry when dealing with a new health issue, with 86 per cent of respondents citing it as a concern. Patients with complex chronic health conditions are particularly exposed to the cumulative impact of financial burden. These may be, for example, patients with chronic complex conditions like psychiatric conditions or cancer care. Patients with these conditions will often have limited ability to shop around or to even change providers. Often, once a therapeutic alliance is forged, it is almost impossible to change. When I say that, I mean it's difficult. Patients and doctors—it's a special bond. They become wedded. Patients become wedded to their specialist. They have confidence and so on and so forth, but they're then also, in some cases, exposed to excessive fees, particularly when public services are limited in a region or there is limited competition.

Information asymmetry is another issue, with patients having limited knowledge of what a service should cost. They may have to shop around or rely on their GP, who is also, to some degree, in the dark. The combined effect of limited transparency, the imbalance of power between provider and patient and excessive fees is compromising access to and affordability of specialist services and is undermining confidence in private health insurance. People are questioning whether they are getting value for money from their private health insurance, and this is all occurring in the context of cost-of-living pressures.

When we came to government, we thought this problem had been fixed. The coalition spent around $24 million of taxpayers' money building the Medical Costs Finder, a website whose entire purpose was to tell Australians what their specialist would charge, and then they made it voluntary. By the end of 2022, out of roughly 6,300 eligible specialists across the 11 specialities on that site, six had published their fees—not six per cent but six doctors. Three years after, it was about 88. Again, it was not 88 per cent but 88 individual doctors, or somewhere around 1.4 per cent. On the insurer's side, it was every bit as voluntary and every bit as ignored. Only about three insurers ever bothered to volunteer their data. That's three. That is what happens when you build a website, cut a ribbon and then disappear. This bill finishes the job.

Instead of waiting for specialists to volunteer, the government will now publish the Medicare hospital and insurer billing data it already collects, backed by a $7 million investment in the technical capability to do that. There is no new paperwork for doctors. The data already exists. We are simply going to show it to the people who are paying those bills. What does it look like? Mock-ups were sought at our committee hearing on 7 April, and that's freely available, if anyone wants to have a look at them. The department has provided these to our committee, and these are early drafts, built on years of research and extensive consultation with the colleges, craft groups, consumers and insurers. These stakeholders all participated in multiple meetings helping to co-design this website and co-design this law.

You search by service or by specialists. You put in your postcode and your fund, and what comes back is not one number. It is the typical specialist fee, then what Medicare pays, then what the insurer pays and then what is actually left up to you, with a low, a typical and a high side shown side by side, so there is a bit of a range there. There are filters for distance, for gender, for language spoken and for speciality. There is a 'last updated' date on the page, and there is a tool that lets you compare how often each insurer has a no-gap arrangement in your state. It's a range. It's not just a single figure.

I did ask the department something else during that hearing: alongside the aggregate fee and the range, would there be qualitative information—something the specialists themselves can craft—and how easy would it be for them to update it? There will be a free-text box, limited in size, for the specialist doctor to give context to their published fees. If you see more complex patients, you say so, and the provider portal already exists. It will have information like fellowships, meaning the qualifications, teaching practices, participation in clinical quality registries—all fields built off feedback from the profession itself.

I think this context is actually important. All specialists are not equal. Specialists tend to then subspecialise into very niche areas in medicine. I can give you a couple of examples. For example, there may be only a couple of people in an entire state who will have the expertise to remove pacemakers when they become infected, which is highly dangerous and very risky and can cause, for example, ventricular rupture and occasionally need to be done when pacemakers become infected. These people are not just down the road. They usually work in tertiary hospitals. They might also be in private practice, but there's only a handful of them in an entire state. That's one example.

Another example might be orthopaedic surgeons who specialise in removing infected joints. Again, these don't happen very often, but if a joint becomes infected it is a catastrophe. It is a catastrophe for the patient. It is a catastrophe for the treating surgeon and for the entire treating team, because it can take up to two years to actually gain control of an infection. What often does happen is that that joint needs to be removed and antibiotic-impregnated cement put in, and then the patient is on prolonged courses of antibiotics, which often have some pretty awful side effects. The surgeons who remove those joints, again, are a minority. They are dealing with complex patients and prolonged surgeries. Sometimes these patients need multiple surgeries. Those are only two examples. There is complexity in medicine. Even amongst, say, surgeons, there will be those who have to deal with the more complex of the complex cohort of patients.

This is not all that this bill does. Insurers must currently get ministerial approval before they lift a premium—that is a safeguard—so some funds have simply closed a popular gold or silver product and opened a near-identical one under a new name at a higher price. Loyal members go looking for the cover they have paid into for years and find that it no longer exists. It's called product phoenixing, and it is a rort. This bill calls time on that. From here, funds will need to get approval not just for annual rate rises but for new products and for any change that reduces the value of an existing one.

While only a minority of specialists charge excessive fees, the cost impact on affected patients is significant, and there is the risk that this could become normalised and spread to the whole market. This bill improves fee transparency and gives patients more control over their healthcare choices while also protecting the integrity of doctors and confidence in private health insurance. I commend this bill to the Senate.

I rise to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. The coalition will not stand in the way of this bill passing the Senate. However, we will be moving a series of substantive amendments to address the shortcomings identified through the committee process. While we support the principles behind this bill, principles alone are not enough.

This legislation makes two key changes to Australia's private health system. Firstly, it introduces transparency by default, with amendments allowing the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to publish information on the medical costs finder about the fees charged by practitioners, including specialists and general practitioners, and the likely out-of-pocket expenses patients will face. It will be welcomed by consumers. Secondly, the bill regulates private health insurance premiums, requiring insurers to seek ministerial approval for new products and for existing products where certain changes are proposed. This change is aimed at addressing the risk of what's known as product phoenixing, where an existing insurance product is closed and a new near-identical new product is opened at a higher premium, deliberately skirting the approval process.

There's no disagreement on greater transparency in healthcare pricing and the need to help consumers make informed choices about their health care. There's no dispute. Australians deserve to know before they walk into a specialist's office roughly what it's going to cost them for that visit. It's not a radical idea; it's actually common sense. But let me be clear about why this matters so much right now.

The Labor Party will tell you that all you need is your Medicare card, but Australians know that that is not true. Just last week, my out-of-pocket expense, paid for with my credit card, was $60. What about those on fixed incomes? What about those on minimum wages, struggling to make ends meet? What about them, Labor? It is those people who are affected the most by rising costs, compounded by your reckless spending, which keeps inflation higher for longer.

Australia's private health system plays a critical role in supporting our public hospitals, with the two systems working hand in hand to ensure all Australians have access to the health care they need. When the private hospital systems and aged-care systems are not functioning correctly, our public hospitals become the waiting room for those who can go nowhere else. The private system relieves pressure on our public hospitals, and right now that could not be more critical. At a time when we are seeing record levels of ambulance ramping and increasing wait times at hospitals right across the country, this is why reforms in this space must be considered carefully. Unintended consequences are very real when you weaken the very system propping up our public hospitals.

Nowhere is the failure of the Labor government in this area to manage the delicate balance more evident than in my home state of South Australia. In my home state, the ramping of ambulances is at record levels—one of the worst performances in the country. So much for the Malinauskas government, which promised it would end ramping. Only last week, it was extraordinary to go to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and see the sea of ambulances just sitting at the front waiting to get in. The Malinauskas government promised to end ramping. In fact, they said, 'Voters, your life will depend on it.' It's now worse than ever. There's another Labor lie for you.

More than 450 older Australians currently remain in hospital despite being medically ready for discharge, leaving our public health system at breaking point. This is the reality of health care under Labor, a system where patients are stranded and hospital resources are diverted from acute care because the broader health and aged-care ecosystem is failing due to lack of care, lack of preparedness and a Labor government that can't fix it. South Australia is home to the current Minister for Foreign Affairs, as well as Labor's Minister for Health and Ageing and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—and another in the Minister for Trade and Tourism. There is that sort of representation from South Australia, and a Labor government in South Australia, and it's that much of a right mess.

The coalition recognised that high out-of-pocket costs for specialists are a major concern for Australians, who are struggling with the rising unaffordability of health care under this government. The out-of-pocket cost to see a GP has skyrocketed to more than $50 under this government, the highest level on record. Out-of-pocket costs for specialist appointments are spiralling too. According to the government's own most recent Medicare data, the bulk-billing rate for specialist attendances sits at just 28.2 per cent, with an average out-of-pocket cost of $124. For anaesthetics, the bulk-billing rate is just 8.7 per cent, with an average out-of-pocket cost of $245. These are not costs the average Australian can easily absorb, let alone older Australians living week to week on fixed incomes who have greater need as they age, or young families with multiple children also caught up in Labor's sick health system. This is forcing Australians to make the impossible decision to avoid seeing a doctor altogether because they simply cannot afford to seek medical attention when they need it. They're delaying it. Research conducted last year by Redbridge showed around 30 per cent of people referred to a medical specialist over the past three years did not attend due to health concerns. I'm not making it up; it's actually there. Australian families are now choosing between seeing a doctor and paying the bills. This is a choice no family should ever be forced to make.

And then there is this government's attack on the private health insurance rebate for older Australians, which sits at the heart of everything that's wrong with Labor's approach to health care. The Albanese Labor government is cutting the additional private health insurance rebate that millions of Australians aged over 65 rely on. It's an ugly way to address Labor's spending. Older Australians who did the right thing for decades, scrimping, saving and paying their own way with private health cover, are now being hit with an $11 billion tax under Labor. National Seniors Australia's own research suggests around 55 per cent of the 3.1 million older Australians set to be hit are pensioners—those who can't just take on another job. Labor is punishing those financially exposed older Australians who have worked hard their whole lives and managed their finances very carefully.

I want to put some faces to those numbers because they are not abstract statistics. These are real South Australians, but they could be Australians anywhere. In the Labor electorate of Boothby, Robert and Debra from Glenelg wrote to me and said:

I have had private health insurance ever since I started work at age 16. I am now 75. This means that I have had 59 years of continuous payments.

My wife Debra, age 68, and I are lucky to not have any ongoing health problems but maintain our gold private health insurance for the time when we might need to start claiming.

They both receive a part pension and have a fixed Public Service pension, but they're finding it difficult to make ends meet. Cash flow is a problem.

Then there's Fiona from the suburb of Black Forest—again in the Labor held electorate of Boothby—who said:

I rang Bupa this morning to discuss the rebate. I told them that after a lifetime of being privately covered, I may have to reconsider and clog up the public health system.

I have worked all my life, as a midwife and a teacher, from 17 years of age to retirement, and now as a working grandma.

It's not a made-up story; it's a very real one.

Here's a story of another real South Australian. Disability pensioner Denise's private health insurance helped pay for a hip and two knee replacements, along with other surgeries. Denise called in to ABC radio to tell listeners:

It's like a security blanket. To have that taken away from me, I would be shattered, absolutely shattered.

These are just a few of the stories behind the 3.1 million Australians set to be hit by these changes. While the government hasn't done the modelling, once again, industry research suggests that more than 250,000 older Australians will downgrade or drop their cover altogether. They'll be left with no choice, and it matters enormously, because older Australians disproportionately have gold and silver cover, which are the levels that include joint replacements, cataract surgery and other procedures that older Australians genuinely need.

Older Australians pushed off gold cover do not disappear from the health system. Instead, they end up on our already clogged elective surgery waitlists. That's what they do. Every older Australian forced to drop or downgrade their cover means longer waitlists, more ambulance ramping and worse outcomes for patients right across the board. Add to that Labor's assault on veterans through the $5,000 annual cap on allied health services. This government just sees no boundaries, only opportunities to cut, cut and cut to fill its ever deepening black hole.

The only guarantee for Australians is that Labor is not listening, and, when it runs out of money, it will come after more of yours. These rebate cuts come on top of the largest health insurance premium rebate rise in eight years—a 4.41 per cent average increase in April—impacting 15 million Australians who rely on private health insurance during this enduring cost-of-living crisis. At the worst possible time, Labor is slugging Australians with high premiums while families are already struggling to keep their heads above water. The Prime Minister waved around his Medicare card and told Australians that it would be free to see a doctor. In reality, Australians are now facing the highest out-of-pocket costs on record, and they are predicted to keep rising.

The coalition is focused on ensuring that all Australians have timely and affordable access to health care. Labor, by contrast, is focused on using Medicare as a political prop—always chasing the headline instead of delivering real outcomes for the Australians who most need them. This is not a new pattern. The former coalition government was bringing private health insurance premium increases under control, delivering the lowest annual premium changes in two decades, with increases progressively getting smaller year on year. But, under Labor, that trend has completely reversed. It has changed trajectory entirely. Premiums are now rising at the fastest rate in almost a decade, driven by the same broader economic mismanagement that has seen inflation sit consistently above RBA target bands. Wages fail to keep pace and business operating costs continue to spiral.

I want to bring this back to South Australia now. My home state has the highest proportion of older Australians on the mainland, and they are the ones who will wear the cost of these changes the hardest. State Labor took a promise to fix the ramping crisis to the last election, and, as I said, it has never been worse. The private health rebate exists so that older Australians' increasing healthcare needs do not place additional pressure on a public system already buckling under Labor governments. Right across South Australia, in towns like Victor Harbor, Mount Gambier, Jamestown and Streaky Bay, there are older South Australians. They're a long way from this Canberra bubble, but they will wear the changes most directly, and it will be worse for those in country towns and centres. If visitation drops because older Australians can no longer afford their private health cover, these small regional hospitals will struggle to remain viable, leaving communities with even fewer local healthcare options and more pressure on already stretched public hospitals.

The coalition supports greater transparency in this bill and a strong private health system more broadly. The coalition will not oppose this bill in the Senate, but our support comes with a clear and unambiguous message to this government. It is time for the Prime Minister to stop waving around his Medicare card for the cameras and actually start addressing the rising affordability crisis facing Australian patients, one that his government's own economic mismanagement has directly caused. Older Australians built this country. Army, Air Force and Navy veterans fought for this country. They deserve a government that backs them, not one that taxes them, strips their rebates and leaves them with an impossible choice between their health and their household budget.

In conclusion, this bill is in part about transparency and publishing costs for medical practitioners, but it must be said that the real issue here is that this bill doesn't recognise that consumers are paying so much more under this Labor government, and it is because of their economic vandalism.

I thank senators who have contributed to the debate on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. It has, as is so often the case in the Senate, been a wide-ranging debate, and many senators have chosen to put on record their thoughts about Australia's health system. I want to make just a couple of points to that end.

The first is this. This government is making a record investment in Medicare, an $8½ billion investment, and that investment has been necessary because of the disgraceful way that public health was ignored and diminished under the previous Liberal government. When we came to government, in the words of our national medical organisations, bulk-billing was in freefall. As a consequence of the changes we are making, we are seeing bulk-billing rates rise again. That is incredibly important because public health matters. When you wish to see a doctor, the only card you should need is a Medicare card. Our government is unapologetic about that. That is why we are making the investments that we are.

It's also why we are investing in urgent care clinics, clinics that mean that, if you have a cut, a sprain or another injury that falls short of what would require an emergency department, you can see a doctor for free. It's important for the families and individuals that are accessing those services. It's also important for hospitals because it is taking pressure off the emergency rooms in hospitals. Again, the government understands that the cost of medicine is an area where we can intervene and make a difference, so medicines this year on the PBS are $25 per script. The cost of medicine has not been that low since 2004.

So I say to senators that this government, unlike the last one, does in fact understand the importance of health care in the lives of Australians. We as a government consequently understand our obligation to invest in health care for all Australians. This bill is part of improving the structure of healthcare delivery in this country. Schedule 1 makes important changes to support greater transparency in healthcare pricing. It helps Australians make more informed decisions about their private healthcare choices, and it does that by providing consumers with more detailed information on the expected medical fees to be charged and likely out-of-pocket costs for their private healthcare experience.

Right now, consumers have a lot more information about routine goods and services that they purchase than they do about their healthcare choices, but those healthcare choices have a profound impact on their quality of life. Without passage of this schedule, we will continue to see many Australians not knowing what their private healthcare journey will cost and being unable to easily compare the cost of alternative providers and therefore unable to make an informed choice about their health care.

Schedule 2 strengthens ministerial oversight of private health insurance premiums and ensures that consumer interests are better protected. To allow insurers to close an existing product and open an identical or similar new product at a higher premium without ministerial scrutiny presents an unacceptable risk to private health insurance customers that needs to be stopped. This will be achieved by requiring ministerial approval not just for proposed premium changes but also when an insurer proposes to open a new product or reduces the coverage, benefits or terms and conditions of a product. Changes are also being made to formalise and enhance the process for approval of premiums. The arrangements are substantially aligned with how the annual premium round has been managed in recent years.

I very much appreciate work of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee in scrutinising this bill and the report that they produced, and I thank those senators who participated in those processes and acknowledge the then chair, Senator Dorinda Cox. I also appreciate the stakeholders who have engaged in good faith with the government on this bill, and I can indicate that, when we do come to the committee stage, there is a government amendment that I intend to move.

We continue to more broadly consider reform options to improve the value of private health insurance and support consumers to make informed decisions about their health care, but these reforms before us today are an important step in helping consumers make informed choices about health care and improving confidence in private health insurance.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.