Bill
Health Insurance Amendment (Safety Net) Bill 2015
lapsed, as at 2016-04-17. Health portfolio.
- Sponsor
- Not recorded
- Portfolio
- Health
Recorded stages
Divisions
- Rob Mitchell The Health Insurance Amendment (Safety Net) Bill 2015 represents cuts of some $270 million to the Medicare safety net. So much for the promise of no cuts to health that this lot opposite promised before the last election. I am here today to tell those opposite that the Australian people are not the bottom line on an accounting spreadsheet. The caps in the bill are not supported by independent reports or input from health professionals. These are blanket caps across a multitude of MBS items or services. The Minister for Health will tell you that the new safety net simplifies the arrangements—but that comes at a cost. It abolishes the existing, original Medicare safety net and the extended Medicare safety net. If you were walking a tightrope and relying on a safety net in case you fell, you would not use a safety net offered by the Abbott-Turnbull government, because you could guarantee it would not be there when you needed it. The Liberals' record on universal health care speaks for itself. In 1974 the Liberals, under Snedden, voted against Medibank—Australia's first universal healthcare scheme, introduced by one of our most progressive prime ministers, Mr Gough Whitlam. Between 1975 and 1981, the Liberals proceeded to rip Medibank apart until a Labor government, led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, came back in and reintroduced the Medicare framework in 1985. In 1987 the then Liberal opposition leader, John Howard, told Australians that bulk-billing would be scrapped, and in 1993 John Hewson took that policy to an election. In 2004, before the election, now ex-prime minister Tony Abbott made a 'rock-solid, ironclad' guarantee he would not raise the Medicare safety net threshold. But what did he do straight after the election, in his usual fashion? With a quick backflip, he did exactly the opposite, because the costings that he had put in place blew out. So much for the theory of great Liberal financial management and control. We know that that, like everyth — 2015-11-25, House of Representatives: affirmative, ayes 78, noes 56
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