CHANGES TO MEDICARE LEVY SURCHARGE ADDS TO THE BAD NEWS FOR LOCAL FAMILIES
The Member for Berowra, Philip Ruddock MP said today that changes to the Medicare levy surcharge introduced in this high taxing, high spending, budget will add to the bad news for local families.
“Labor clearly stated in the past that they would keep the Medicare levy surcharge, yet by increasing the threshold in the budget at which singles are now required to pay the Medicare surcharge, they have opened the door for hundreds of thousands of mostly young people to leave private health insurance,” Mr Ruddock said.
“The impact of this will be quite dramatic as these people will need to access the already burdened public hospital system if they become ill and they have not retained their private health insurance.
“This is effectively an attack on the private health industry, because if you attack private health insurance you attack health funding overall.
“Private health insurance adds money to the health system overall” said. “9.4 million Australians have private health insurance and as a result of this decision, private health insurance premiums will go through the roof”.
The people who will drop out will be young people who are less likely to make claims and as they are the best customers for private health insurers, this is heading towards what appears to be a calamity for private health insurers in Australia
“By potentially removing around 400,000 people from the Medicare rebate system, the Rudd government is expecting to make savings of almost $1 billion,” Philip Ruddock said.