Stephen Duckett

speaker

921 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2006 last heard May 2019

Stephen Duckett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Health Report · Out-of-pocket costs and the future of private health insurance · 28 May 2018 podcast

So the reforms I don't think are going to address the problem.

So I think what's going to happen is we're going to still see these complaints.

We're going to still see people dropping their level of coverage.

and potentially dropping their coverage altogether, which will cause a vicious spiral for health insurance, so the people who don't need the coverage will drop out, leaving behind the people who are sicker, which means the premiums will go up, which means more people drop out, and so on.

Hundreds of people have sent

Yes and no.

Because the reality is we know from all the literature that everybody thinks their doctor is lovely, but that doctors collectively are the problem.

It's quite unfair to blame private health insurance for not covering all the outrageous bills that doctors submit.

Doctors are able to charge whatever they like.

It's almost impossible for an insurance company to set a premium that covers whatever some doctor charges, and those fees may be an order of magnitude above what the schedule fee is, what the government has said is a fair rate for this procedure.

Is there any way of controlling this?

Traditionally we have said there are constitutional limitations, that the constitution says the government

Is not able to force doctors to do anything, basically.

But I think we've been too scared of that constitutional limitation.

We ought to be putting pressure on doctors to be more reasonable in their fees.

We ought to be requiring doctors to publish what they charge, and we ought to be giving health insurance funds more ability to actually do some negotiations with the private hospitals and the doctors to try.

Try and make sure that patients are not left holding huge bills.

So I support a system where if doctors charge twice, three times, four times the schedule fee, the schedule fee is no longer paid, and the doctors are forced to tell the patient that I'm a real outlier in what I charge you.

But more importantly, the doctors have no evidence that their high fees are associated with better quality.

They are just claiming that I'm a good doctor, therefore I should charge what I like.

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