Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee [Part 2], , 1:16:34 to 1:19:29
Discussion focuses on the projected increase in public hospital patient days and the resulting financial burden on state and territory health systems due to federal insurance changes.
Topics: Health, Government spending
Speakers: Senator Anne Ruston
You have never provided me with any information about um the downgrading of cover. Um, so we also have a situation where the potential impact of these potential downgrades, the actual product that they're downgrading to may not exist into the future because you're you're out at the moment consulting on changes more broadly to private health insurance. So I suppose what I'm trying to understand is we're sitting here today, the the bill got um discharged from the notice paper. The government then chose to immediately reintroduce that bill into the lower house and that's where it is at the moment. Um we're now close on six months since this is announced. There's been great concern expressed about uh the lack of information about the impact on the public hospital system. Um we've had states and territories just about all of them come out and be concerned about this. And we're sitting here on the 28th of October and I am seeking to understand what the broader implications on the public hospital system are. And in the 6 months since this has been announced, it appears if you have done no more work to try and determine what that is. The only thing I have is a document that says 154,000. What's it 241 people uh oh sorry 100 153,241 additional patient days are likely to occur in 2829 um based on the the evidence of the average cost of a a stay in hospital that's around $420 million a year. But if you then extrapolate that up at a 77.3% increase in the number of people in public hospitals, if you move to the 78,000 in the second year of this, we're talking about um nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars of additional costs that will be flowed to the public hospital system. We don't know whether that continues to increase into 203031. But even if you just take the figures of 78,000, that is just about chewed up. Every single cent of saving to the federal government from this measure has been transferred directly into the states and territories hospital system. So I suppose maybe secretary why given the extra time that you've had available to you haven't you bothered to chase down um the information that quite clearly officials in your department thought was important to try and seek only minutes after the announcement was made and here we are sitting at the end of October and your officials tell me they don't know the answer.