In Australia, we’re blessed with a truly amazing thing called public healthcare. It means that even if you’re poor, you’re covered for the basic medical expenses which keep you alive. But Mark Fitzgibbon, managing director of private health fund NIB, reckons that the government should scrap Medicare and make us all pay him to ensure we don’t die. Nice!
In an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review, Mr Fitzgibbon called on the government to make our healthcare system much more like America’s famously excellent system. He proposes that we ditch the publicly run system and use that money to subsidise providers like his own.
Basically, he reckons that it’s really tough being a health insurer because Australians simply have it too good with Medicare. Mr Fitzgibbon refers to Medicare as a “government monopoly” (or what I would call “making sure people don’t die because they’re broke).
He does, as part of his plan, offer a subsidy for low-income earners. Which is nice of him:
[The] sensible policy approach would be to make private health insurance compulsory for all Australians with taxation devoted to subsidising the premiums for those who would otherwise be left behind.
If you weren’t already aware, we have this thing called the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS). Basically, the MLS is a fee that you pay if you earn over a certain amount ($90,000 for singles and $180,000 for families) and choose not to pay for private hospital cover. So many people are actually already paying for private insurance, even if they don’t actually have private health insurance.
But even if we all could actually afford private health, it doesn’t even cover everything. And trust me, if you’re on Newstart, you definitely can’t afford private health.
All of this nonsense started because of a warning issued by The Grattan Institute, a policy thinktank. Basically, it said that the health insurance industry is dying because young people can’t afford their ever-growing costs and don’t see them as providing a valuable product.
If the name Mark Fitzgibbon sounds familiar, it’s for two reasons. Firstly, he’s the brother of Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon. Secondly, it’s because he’s the guy that basically tried to shut everyone up last year when people were (understandably) concerned about their My Health Record privacy.
“We cannot do that without information about who you are,” he said. “We desperately need this data to make the world a better place,” Fitzgibbon said last year.
As one small mercy, health minister Greg Hunt said today that he has no intention of implementing a plan like Fitzgibbon proposes.
“I did see one comment today questioning Medicare, and I have to say clearly and categorically that we reject that proposition: clearly, categorically and absolutely,” Hunt said.
