According to a recent report, the private healthcare system’s death knell has been rung by the low participation of young people. Good. Why would we sign up? I, for one, welcome its demise.
The year I turned 30 I received two letters from the government: a robodebt and another letter stating that I had until July 1, following my 31st birthday, to buy private health insurance in order to secure lower premiums for life.
The punishment if I did not conform? A 2% increase on the cost of taking out private health insurance for every year I failed to do so. If I wait until I’m 65 to succumb to private health insurance, I will pay an extra 70%.
I threw the letter in the bin. Alleviation of suffering should be a fundamental human right for everyone, not just the rich, and the continuation of private healthcare undermines access for the most vulnerable.
Lawful extortion
As we saw with the Department of Human Service’s robodebt program, the government’s unsustainable support of private enterprise is being bolstered by exploiting legal loopholes in order to engage in lawful extortion. If such actions weren’t enshrined in government policy, you’d be forgiven for mistaking them for a mafia protection racket.
The recession of insidious private growth is good news for the poor if policymakers choose to level up Medicare to free universal healthcare for everyone. The privatisation of sickness is a social and economic ailment in itself. The Howard government introduced the immoral, but potentially unsurprising, measure in 2000. The punitive policy was an attempt to attract young people to private healthcare. After almost 20 years, it is fair to say that Howard’s policy has completely failed.
The industry’s “death spiral” is a symptom of larger problems too; stagnant wage growth, rampant casualisation of jobs, and the soaring cost of living are a few examples. Evidence in the flailing economy points to the exponential decay of the free market.
The half-life of 70 years of neoliberalism is close to diminished. It peaked before the first millennials entered the workforce. Today we see a desperate recuperation of capital across the board — be it robodebt, plummeting interest rates, or rushed tax cuts — all signalling the imminent relinquishment of a perverse economics that is malfunctioning. Too much, too late. And young people are (literally and figuratively) not buying it.
Bring on free universal healthcare
Of course, the unabating politics of alienation employed by the government extends beyond generational lines. The state’s punitive coercion of poor and working class citizens to piss away their incomes on private health insurance that is of no measurable benefit to them is deliberately classist by design.
I don’t feel sorry for the collapse of the private health industry when we could have free universal healthcare tomorrow.
Australia can afford free universal healthcare, but successive governments have opted for a hybrid model. While the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is imperfect, there is more value to be added to Medicare by appropriating something from the NHS’ delivery of free healthcare than there is in, say, lifting tricks from the aforementioned playbook for subsidy-slinging wannabe neoliberal gangsters.
A friend of mine is a British administration worker who has directly benefited from the NHS. She was admitted to emergency after a suicide attempt, at a time when she was barely making minimum wage, and says she “could’ve died” without the NHS. “I saw a psychiatrist for therapy sessions once a week for 18 months at no cost. There’s no way I could’ve afforded this otherwise and therapy has had a hugely positive impact on my life since then.”
Currently, neither Medicare nor Basic or Bronze plans offered by private health insurance providers (about $1000 per year) fully cover psychiatric or psychological therapy. Even if you cough up for a Gold plan you “are likely to face substantial out-of-pocket expenses” for hospital psychiatric services.
Like all neoliberal structures permeating the late stages of capitalism, the privatisation of healthcare has a glass ceiling. Taxpayers can’t prop up private enterprise forever and they shouldn’t have to; whether it be private healthcare, private schools, or franking credits. After almost 20 years of bad policy it would seem that ceiling is starting to crack.
Here’s hoping for free and accessible healthcare for those aged over 30, when it inevitably rains glass.
We’d love to hear about your experiences with the private healthcare system. Email boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name.
Is this comments thread going to disappear as the one relating to the head of border farce has?
Asking for a friend.
Excellent question, Hamster. Just as that thread was getting interesting, it disappeared. I wonder if there was some sort of threat from the creep under discussion.
I think I asked the same question. Sorry guys, it might have been closed down because of my comment.
Surely not DB, you mentioned attending the same school… shudder… and not much else (unless there was a further comment from you that I missed).
Crikey should be complemented for commissioning and Kirsten Drysdale for writing the article as effectively as she did. This is one of the reasons I subscribe, another is the correspondence prompted by articles. I don’t think the problem lies with either Crikey, it’s writers or correspondents, a track record lies elsewhere.
Totally agree Johnb. Maybe Crikey can commission Kirsten to follow up with more articles to shed some light on the reptiles who have infiltrated the Public Service since at least John Howard if not earlier.
I believe comments do disappear. Try mentioning the name Downer in certain contexts and see where you get.
I should have replied instead of posting a new comment (my inattention). That comment is still hung up waiting moderation.
Subsidies for coal companies and private health funds but not the car industry.
I think the Coalition might welcome this crisis as an excuse to push us their preferred ideological direction.
If a British system is the answer, it will be a titanic struggle, noting that this year is 70 years since Chifley’s noble attempt to nationalise the banks produced a fierce and successful resistance campaign by the private industry and the Liberals.
Bluntly, 60% of the taxpayer PHI (private health insurance) subsidy does nothing but swell the profits of the PHI rent-seekers with no benefit whatever to patients or the system’s health. Modelling indicates that savings from reducing spending on rebates EXCEED the predicted increase in public hospital costs by a factor of roughly 2.5. We save a LOT of money by dumping the private system (as long as all the money saved goes to the public system)!
What right have – as one ideologue at ‘The Australian’ put it – “tens of thousands of health fund members [to] wonder what government spending is more important than them”? Obviously they have the customary Rightist Culture of Entitlement to subsidies, but society is under no obligation to agree. Never mind that the same ideologue wrote “the insurance sector is being propped up” with members “paying higher premiums, and receiving less in government subsidies, for a product that may not meet their needs and, to many, does not provide value for money”.
If private health insurance can’t provide value for money after $6,000 million in taxpayer subsidies, why does it deserve any? End the fabulous subsidies by using them to fund the public health system to take the caseload. We’ll save heaps!
What is the point of this rant? Free universal health insurance is called Medicare has been around for a while .
“free” health care and “free” NDIS is funded by the Medicare tax described as a levy.
FYI. Taxes do not pay for anything. Govt spending is not revenue constrained. MMT basics.
I hear you. My current private health insurance premiums are just under $400 a month, which covers me, my partner and my son. I signed up at age 31 only because of the intimidation of premiums increasing by 2% every year after age 30. I ended up paying that 2% until, graciously, it was waved because I’d been covered continuously for 10 years. And indeed I’m lucky because I qualify for insurance from a fund that has limited membership.
In all the years I’ve had it, I’ve appreciated it only once, when my partner was in hospital for two weeks with a badly broken leg. The private health insurance got her a single room in a private hospital while she waited for surgery. They still struggled though to feed her a ceoliac diet, despite the huge cost per day.
And, get this, she was operated on by the exact same surgeon who would have worked on her at the public hospital she was first admitted to.
I can’t wait for it to die out, and I’ll happily cut up my card.
Why don’t you cut up your card now? If your income exceeds the Medicare Levy Surcharge threshold > $90,000 pa, then you will incur a 1% levy (and 1.25%-1.5% at higher income). So you are looking at a $900 additional charge in comparison to the lowest PHI coverage of approximately (hospital cover basic) $73 a month or $884 pa. Which seems like a break even to me.