Medicare and Private Health Insurance
Debates regarding Medicare focus on the two-tier system and the role of private health insurance. Controversial issues include:
- Whether people with means should take up private health insurance
- Whether rebates/incentives should be given in terms of private health insurance
- People with health insurance still accessing the tax-payer funded public system rather than relying on their insurance.
- People with private health insurance are still required to pay a 1.5% levy on their taxes regardless of their income and usage of the system.
People who take up private health insurance are currently rewarded in a number of ways. They receive a Private Health Insurance Rebate that subsidises 30% of their insurance premiums, increasing to 35% or 40% for people over 65. Critics say that the rebate is an unfair subsidy to those who can afford health insurance, claiming the money would be better spent on public hospitals where it would benefit everyone. Supporters say people must be encouraged into the private health care system, claiming the public system is not universally sustainable for the future. Similarly, even after the introduction of the rebate, some private health insurance organisations have raised their premiums most years, somewhat negating the benefit of the rebate.
As at March 2010 approximately 44.5% of Australians also retain private health insurance, even though they are already entitled to free treatment in public hospitals.
The proportion of Australians with private health insurance was declining, but has increased again with the introduction of Lifetime Health Cover (where people who take out private hospital insurance later in life pay higher premiums than those who have held coverage since they were younger) and tax incentives to take out private cover (such as the Medicare Levy Surcharge).
Read more about this topic: Medicare (Australia)
Famous quotes containing the words private, health and/or insurance:
“For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“However strongly they resist it, our kids have to learn that as adults we need the companionship and love of other adults. The more direct we are about our needs, the easier it may be for our children to accept those needs. Their jealousy may come from a fear that if we adults love each other we might not have any left for them. We have to let them know that it’s a different kind of love.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 3 (1978)
“In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.””
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)