Terje Petersen considers reforming Medicare through a HECS-style payment system:
The level of debate regarding health care reform in Australia is really rather pedestrian. We should be opening up the health sector to more private involvement and more personal responsibility. We need more price signals on both the supply and the demand side of the equation. However it seems the best we can manage in price signals is a modest tax rebate from the Liberals if you buy private insurance, and a higher medicare levy by the ALP if you don’t. Neither of these is the sort of market price signal we need. We need price signals that link consumers to suppliers.
Currently the medicare levy raises about 1/6 th of the amount that the government actually spends on health. If the Medicare levy was meant to raise the revenue needed to pay for Medicare it would need to be about 9%. So if we increased in from 1.5% (there abouts) to 9% and cut income taxes by 7.5% we would still pay the same in taxes (the levy is a tax) but we would have a lot more transparency informing the debate.
Each quarter we ought to get mailed a statement from the Medicare office outlining how much expenditure we incurred using our Medicare card. Again this would not change the benefit we receive but it would improve transparency and better inform the debate.
If the Medicare statement suggested above was actually an invoice and we were required to repay the expenses we incurred using our medicare card this would allow us to cut taxes by about 9% (inclusive of the current 1.5% Medicare levy or else just the 9% levy suggested above). Given the dead weight cost of taxation this would be real boost to the economy.
However there is a social policy concern with this approach that cuts to the heart of why Australians overwhelmingly like Medicare. The cost may deter poorer people from getting treatment. Fair enough. We can fix this concern by allowing people who can’t or don’t pay the invoice to automatically roll the debt from their Medicare invoice onto their HECS debt. In short Medicare would become an income contingent loan from the government. The Medicare card would become an alternate payment system much like VISA or Mastercard but issued by the government and with an income contingent repayment plan. Social concern fixed because nobody is denied essential health care on the basis of affordability. HECS could be renamed to the “Health and Education Contribution Scheme” and still abbreviated as HECS.
Okay some people don’t want to burden their future self with such a debt. That is up to them. They can take out private insurance instead or pay as they go using cash. People will vary in their preference but nobody will miss out on medical service due to an incapacity to pay. And insurance could be bought unencumbered by the current prescriptive government rules about inclusions and excess thresholds. Consumer demand and insurance company innovation coupled via the market would allow a process of discovery to determine what health services get paid for by insurance and what get’s paid for via cash. Whether insurance has a small excess or a large excess. Whether we mostly all have the same scheme or if we want a lot of variety.
Having reformed the demand side of the equation we should seek to reform the supply side by privatising hospitals. We already have private GPs, private specialists, private medical centres and private pathology services. In fact most routine encounters with the medical sector is already through a private provider. We even have numerous private hospitals. It isn’t a sector that benefits from either government ownership or government operation so we should extricate the government from it and allow hospitals to focus on treating patients and allow governments to instead focus on making better laws.
Others have suggested that health care should be provided by governments issueing vouchers which people then use to pay for private insurance. My view is that this approach will lead to governments being prescriptive about what insurance policies must include. About what excess they must provide. They will tend to exclude the option to self insure for some medical expenses. In short I don’t think a voucher scheme would drive the same dynamic process of innovation.
Terje Petersen is a libertarian blogger and stood as a political candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party in the last two federal elections. This article was initially published at Thoughts on Freedom.
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