THIS IS SICK

If you are feeling a bit confused, a bit betrayed and more than a little scared about what the Rudd Government has planned in changes to your health benefits in next week’s Budget then join the club. Remember, this is the mob, that only 18 months ago was making huge election promises about fixing our hospitals and making medical care a top priority.

Wouldbe Prime Minister Kevin Rudd boasted that if the states couldn’t get their act together he wouldn’t only take over one small hospital in Tasmania –he’d take over the lot. After his first year in office. He sounded just like Harry Truman. The buck stops here.

Now it’s starting to sound like ‘The buck stops here—and I’ll bank it’.  The Australian today has one of those Budget leaks that are always denied or at least treated with obfuscation and designed to soften you up for bad news.

You know the formula. Threaten a horror budget. A black, black budget. And when it’s only dark grey you think they’ve done you a favour.

The newspaper claims that the Ruddster will take nearly $2 billion from middle and high income earners by slashing their 30% private health insurance rebates. Some people will lose it completely.

Predictably, that will force more people out of increasingly expensive private insurance and into a creaking, over-loaded public hospital system but there’s an additional sting in that.

If higher income earners don’t stick with private insurance their Medicare levy surcharge will increase by as much as 50%.  A classic pincer movement. A gotcha.

Well, they have to find somebody to pay for the $900 stimulus handout. And the first home buyer handouts and the baby bonuses.

And watch out for a slew of other broken promises –all excused by the parlous world financial crisis.

You’ll need your baby bonus when you have to start paying more to see private obstetricians. And if you’re trying to get pregnant IVF is going to cost you a lot more. It will price some people out of the program forever.

Funny isn’t it. Wasn’t that Julia Gillard we saw as Shadow Health Minister, not so long ago, actually launching a public petition against proposed limits to Medicare-funded IVF treatment.

She accused the Howard Government of treating children as ‘non-essential’.

Maybe after Howard’s core and non core promises we’re getting Rudd’s essential and non-essential promises.  And remember Hinch’s Hunch on changes to superannuation.

Friday, May 8, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009