MURRAY JONES, HOST: Well, my special guest in studio this morning. Welcome to Cairns. Federal Minister for Health Mark Butler. Good morning. How are you?
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: I'm well, Murray. What beautiful weather.
JONES: You've really turned it on, because you were supposed to be here last year just in time for Tropical Cyclone Jasper. So you had to call your trip off, I understand.
BUTLER: That's right. We were scheduled to open the Urgent Care Clinic down in Edmonton. It opened anyway, because it had a lot of important work to do during the cyclone, but I was strongly advised not to come.
JONES: Yeah. Good reasoning, too! It was certainly bedlam up here for a couple of days. Look, let's talk about the Urgent Care Clinic. It's been in position there for about a year now, obviously. And, you know, I guess filling an essential gap when it comes to care in the community. Maybe still a bit of misunderstanding as to why you would go there. And you do hear stories about, you know, some of the allied health services around town actually sending people there for the wrong reasons. But I guess, you know, it's still filling such a, such an urgent gap in health care in the region.
BUTLER: Yeah. I drove past the ED at Cairns Hospital late last night. When I arrived, it was overflowing, there were people sitting outside. Part of the reason for the Urgent Care Clinics is to take that pressure off hospital EDs. They're designed for situations where you need to be seen urgently, as the name suggests, but you don't need to be seen in a fully equipped hospital, so it's not a life threatening emergency. Some of the examples are: you get a deep laceration, your kid falls off the skateboard or gets injured in Saturday afternoon sport and breaks their wrist or something like that. Obviously, you can't wait for several days, sometimes, it takes to get into your usual GP, but you don't need to go to a hospital ED. The problem is: up until now, that's really been the only choice. Parents have been taking their kids who fell off the skateboard and literally spending hours and hours waiting in a crowded emergency department. Cairns South is now one of 84 that I've opened across the country. Last week we saw the millionth patient go through them. One million patients already gone through, fully bulk billed. Every single patient is fully bulk billed. They're open 7 days a week, extended hours, and available to walk in, you don't have to make an appointment. They're really filling a gap that I identified in the Australian health system.
JONES: Sure!
BUTLER: The best health system in the world. But most countries we compare ourselves to have this urgent care model that sits somewhere between a standard general practice, which you go to see for your regular checks, your chronic diseases and things like that. So a standard general practice on the one hand, and a fully equipped hospital on the other. For too long we've had nothing in between. It's serving a really important purpose.
JONES: And look, let's just pick up on something you said there, because I was talking to somebody from England the other day, and a little while ago somebody from the US. You know, when it comes to the systems that we've got here in Australia, we are just head and shoulders above so many other places in the world. And a lot of Australians, I don't think, truly appreciate that, Mark.
BUTLER: There's a very reputable global ranking of health care systems, the Commonwealth Fund. And it did its annual report a couple of months ago and Australia ranked number one in the world. And importantly, for a number of years now, it's ranked number one for healthcare outcomes, what it actually delivers to your health and your listeners’ health. Also importantly, number one for health equity. And in the 40th year of Medicare, that's really important. Because that was the driving principle behind Medicare. Back then, the most common cause of household bankruptcies was unpaid hospital bills and health bills. Overnight, with the introduction of Medicare in February 1984, that disappeared as a cause of household bankruptcy. And that's really why we rank so highly for health equity in access to the best quality healthcare system in the world. No matter what your income, no matter what your credit card balance, you just need that little green card, the Medicare card.
JONES: Excellent. Look, I guess as part of this, in a lot of ways, the urgent care system as well, is something that's really filling an important need. 5B Walker Road at Edmonton, I believe it is, if you're heading down there today. I don't know whether I'm allowed to say too much about the RFDS, but I believe you've got an announcement in the wings about the Royal Flying Doctor Service as well?
BUTLER: Yeah, I'm heading out to the base later this morning to meet with RFDS. We've signed a $1 billion deal to give them 10 years of security. Very rare for government to enter into a 10-year agreement. Usually, we want to review our funding commitments on behalf of taxpayers much more regularly than that. But RFDS has almost chalked up 100 years of service, particularly to rural and remote Australia, and we need to back them in, frankly. We've done that 10-year, $1 billion deal, but I've also had to top that money up with about $75 million we found in the Budget this year. Partly that's because just the cost of delivering services is rising. But for a service that's heavily dependent on fuel, the international fuel prices has knocked their budget around a little bit as well. We've been monitoring their situation very closely.
They're delivering thousands of aeromedical evacuations for people who don't live near a hospital like we do here in Cairns or I do in Adelaide. They're doing thousands of them every year. But less commonly known than the evacuations that the aero evacuations, they deliver a lot of primary health care, a lot of mental health care, a lot of dental care out in remote Australia. We need to back them in to continue doing that as well. That's one of the number of things -- I think I'm doing 6 or 8 different visits today with Matt Smith, our terrific candidate here in Leichhardt, and Senator Nita Green.
We've made a lot of changes to the healthcare system since we got elected. It was our top priority to strengthen Medicare and to deliver cheaper medicines. Because after ten years of cuts, but particularly after the COVID pandemic, although we have the best health care system in the world, it's under real pressure. It's under real pressure. We've been able to deliver more doctors, including here in Cairns and the surrounding regions, more bulk billing. Cairns bulk billing is up after we tripled the bulk billing incentive to GPs. We're opening more Urgent Care Clinics and medicines are now cheaper, but although that's making a real difference, I know people are still doing it really tough, including in their access to affordable health care. I'm up here to talk to Matt and to Nita and also the healthcare system in Cairns about what else we can do to strengthen Medicare more.
JONES: Let's talk a little bit more about 'phoenixing'. I picked up on a story overnight where, as I recall, I reckon something similar happened to me a couple of years ago, where I had to basically change my private health insurance to get an identical product was going to cost me so much more. But basically, it was a situation where they sound like they were offering me something new, but in real terms it wasn't. It was actually far less. This is something that you're trying to tackle: a little bit stealthy, underhanded by some of the health insurers, where they're basically changing the product and to actually get the continuing same amount of coverage, you're going to be paying a lot more. But it's being done in a very underhanded way.
BUTLER: Yeah, it's really a loophole in the system that a number of insurers are exploiting. Just to remind your listeners: health insurance companies are only able to lift the price of their premiums with the approval of the Health Minister – with my approval. I'm going through a process right now with the health insurers about what they want to do through price increases next year. But they've been getting around this. If you think about your insurer, you might be a Queensland family with a gold product from insurer “X”. They're not allowed to lift the price of that product without my approval. But what they are doing is: they're closing that product and they're opening a new product which is identical, offers the same sort of services and same refunds for hospital or general services, but at a higher price. And we've been informed by the Commonwealth Ombudsman and by the consumer group Choice, who've done a lot of work together on this year. That price increase might be 20 to 25% higher. It's a real loophole. It's very sneaky. I called them out on it yesterday after I received the report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman earlier that day and that's been published. I said they've just got to stop. They've really got to stop this sneaky practice, or I reserve the right next year to change the law to stop them doing it.
JONES: If you've got an existing policy, you know, obviously, you know, they can't change that.
BUTLER: You’re covered.
JONES: But as soon as you start to say, look, I need to change it for whatever reason, that's the time to make sure you be aware of some of these.
BUTLER: That's right. You might be two people in the same hospital with the same product receiving the same service, a knee replacement or birth of your child and be paying completely different premiums depending on when you entered the product. They've discovered a way to get around the system. The system only allows them to increase prices with the approval of the government. Because although they're private companies, they get billions of dollars in support from taxpayers through the private health insurance rebate. They're effectively delivering a public service, in many cases through a profit-making company, and they've got to recognise that carries with it a social licence. And they're putting that social licence at risk by this phoenixing practice that we've called out yesterday.
JONES: Yeah. No, it's a real concern moving forward. Welcome to Cairns. Have a fantastic day. Thanks for bringing such beautiful weather to the tropical north. I know you got a busy day ahead. Federal Minister for Health Mark Butler, have a great day.
BUTLER: Thanks Murray.