Federal Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler in 2024
ANMF has welcomed Federal Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler’s decision to seek advice on introducing regulatory action in the event health insurance funds do not increase payments to private hospitals.
Increased health insurance fund payments to private hospitals, either voluntary or through regulation, are essential to ensure Australia has an appropriately-funded and viable private healthcare system.
In response to recent private hospital closures and employer responses to ANMF claims for improved wages and conditions, ANMF has been lobbying for Albanese Government intervention to increase health insurance payments to private hospitals through regulation or legislation.
Minister Butler’s comments were reported in the Australian Financial Review on Wednesday 5 March in the lead up to an important meeting of senior health insurance and hospital executives scheduled for Friday 7 March.
ANMF is currently negotiating improved wages and conditions for members at St Vincent’s Private Hospitals, The Bays Healthcare Group (negotiations resume in June), Brunswick Private Hospital (Aurora), South Eastern Private Hospital (Aurora) and Epworth.
Enterprise bargaining negotiations are also coming up in 2025 for members at Healthscope (EBA expires June), St John of God Health Care (EBA expires June), Ramsay Healthcare (EBA expires September) and Cabrini Health (EBA expires October).
We are encouraging members to sign our ‘Nurses and midwives need a better deal’ online petition calling on health insurance funds to share more of their $2.13 billion profit with private hospitals to cover rising costs and ensure the sector’s long-term viability.
In the year to March 2024 private health insurers’ combined profit jumped 34 per cent to a record $2.13 billion (data released by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Agency). At the same time the proportion of premiums they are returning to their customers has fallen from 88.03 per cent in 2019-20 to 82.61 per cent in 2022-23.
On 26 February, Minister Butler announced he had approved an average health insurance premium increase of 3.73 per cent after asking insurers to resubmit their claims three times so they could consider their years of record profits. The increase takes effect from 1 April 2025.
Australian policyholders will receive $7.6 billion in taxpayer funding this year through the private health insurance rebate. The Albanese Government reintroduced indexation of the rebate threshold this year.
ANMF (Vic Branch) Secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick said: ‘Nurses and midwives are the backbone of private hospitals, yet we’re hearing from employers they have limited ability to improve wages, staffing levels or conditions that are consistent with their Victorian public sector counterparts .
‘It’s unacceptable that private nurses’ and midwives’ wages, terms and conditions and safe staffing levels are being restrained so health insurance companies can further profit.
‘There are nursing and midwifery retention and recruitment issues in Victoria, Australia and the world – fair wage increases are vital to keeping an early career and experienced workforce,” Ms Fitzpatrick said.
‘The other way is to improve staffing levels to provide safer patient care and manageable workloads for nurses and midwives.
‘This means private hospitals must have funding levels to meet the costs of providing safe healthcare to Victorians too.’
