Do you think health insurance in Australia is worth it?

Or are public hospitals just as good?
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For people who really believe that private hospitals are better than the public health system, I think they should feel free to use them and therefore may want health insurance to help cover those costs. However, I am not one of those people. I think that the public system is quite satisfactory and it deserves our advocacy. Irrespective of this, if you have the money you are perfectly entitled to be a private patient (in a private or public hospital) if you choose, whether or not you have health (hospital) insurance. It just means that you won't have a private fund that you can make a claim against. Having said that, most people who advocate private treatment do not realise that when you are treated as a private patient and do not have a fund to handle the costs for you, you can still make a claim with medicare to be reimbursed some of the costs. The amount reimbursed will be based on the medicare scheduled fee, and of course only applies to services that medicare has an item number for. This is no different to visiting a GP or specialist who refuses to bulk bill. You take your bill to medicare, and they will pay you a proportion (usually 75-85% of the schedule fee) and you carry the remaining cost. Further, there are a couple of medicare thresholds which apply when you're medical expenses exceed certain levels. One relates to gap payments (the portion between the schedule fee and the amount medicare normally reimburses) and the other relates to out of pocket expenses (any expenses over and above the schedule fee). You have to be pretty sick (or have a lot of sick dependants) for these thresholds to kick in, but it's still excellent that they are available. Unlike private funds, medicare doesn't place a maximum amount that they will reimburse you in any given year. In fact, under medicare, the more your medical expenses are, the more medicare will end up paying (due to the thresholds mentioned above). It bothers me that many, many, taxpayers are members of private funds purely because of the medicare levy surcharge and the lifetime healthcover rules. This gives the health funds a captive audience, to the extent that I think that people who have "extras" cover are being subsidised by those with hospital cover. Next time you receive information from your health fund telling you how much in every dollar is paid out in benefits, giving a breakdown, you'll see that for hospital cover only fund members, a very large part of your contribution goes towards funding benefits that are not available to you! So, it's not really a question of whether health insurance is worth it because market forces are not really permitted to decide. Fund memberships are artificially propped up by people who have done their maths and have worked out that it's going to cost them more in medicare levy surcharge than it will to pay for the least expensive hospital cover available, but might otherwise be happy to be covered purely by medicare. That's not much of a choice. Personally, I believe that Medicare is one of the best things that our federal government provides because it's available to everyone - not just the wealthy and not just the extremely poor, and I don't want to see it eroded. There seems to be a prevailing belief that by discouraging people from using the public health system, this somehow helps it. It won't. That's the kind of logic that leads to services being reduced "due to lack of utilisation". I would like to see a public health system that even people who can afford to go private will want to use, purely by choice. And if almost everyone uses it, why should anyone begrudge their tax dollars supporting it? And of course, everyone (rich or poor) should pay the same price, which again is not what happens when the private system is utilised. By increasing the use of the public system there will be strong political motivation to ensure that it's well funded and maintained for the benefit of everyone. What's happening with health insurance would be analogous to the fire brigade being segregated into public and private sectors. We all benefit from having the fire brigade available. Whether our house is the one burning down or not, we like to know that we can call on the fire brigade to spring into action and that our taxes ensure that this service is available to us. We don't pay a fee depending on how big the fire is or how big our house is or what have you. The fire brigade does it's best to help everyone equally. We don't feel a need to call on a private fire brigade that will charge us more money to do the same job and sends us silly leaflets in the mail or extinguishes fires exclusively with holy water while they set us up with a deck chair and a colour tv to watch, and subsequently we don't need to subscribe to special insurance to try and offset those (potential) costs. Yet this is effectively what we are doing to our health system. It's ridiculous!
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