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Steve Fielding: Defender of the wealthy
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There are some interesting facts and figures around Steve Fielding voting with the Coalition, as he almost invariably does, to block the Government’s bill to increase the Medicare levy surcharge threshold. Fielding got 56,376 votes in the 2004 election, or 1.77% of Victorian votes. That’s just under one-sixth of the 330,000 Australians who will miss out on a tax cut because of him. In proportion, about 83,000 Victorians will miss out. Not that Labor should complain about him — after all, he’s there on its preference flows. Fielding blocked the Medicare bill because of concerns about the impact of the rise in health insurance premiums on low-income families. The Department of Health and Ageing estimates that premiums would rise by less than 2.5% as a consequence of any flow-on effect on remaining members. On the average private health insurance policy, that’s just over $20 a year, before the taxpayer-funded rebate. The average tax cut flowing from increasing the surcharge threshold was about $1200. As they say in the classics, do the math. And it’s not as if too many low income families actually have health insurance. According to the ABS, in 2004-05, more than 70% of people in the lowest income quintile didn’t have health insurance, compared to less than 25% of people in the highest income quintile. So Fielding’s concerns are mainly about middle and higher income earners. Like those rich farmers he negotiated a tax break for on the luxury car tax earlier this week. The private health insurance industry have done an outstanding job in preventing the reduction in one of its key taxpayer supports. It has produced “independent” reports to show the disastrous impact of the levy, and the media has lapped it up. We tried to ask Steve Fielding how many times he has met with private health insurance industry representatives on this issue, but his office has an answering machine on — too bad for any constituents wanting to contact the Senator — and they had not returned our call by deadline. The Medicare surcharge and health insurance rebates remain the most outrageous examples of rent-seeking in the Commonwealth sector. In addition to forcing taxpayers to buy products they don’t want, it hands out billions to private companies. Unlike other industries, however, private health insurance is so heavily integrated into a government-dominated sector that it has no choice. It’s the price we pay for having a publicly-funded healthcare system with no price signals. That’s the paradox at the heart of Labor’s approach to health insurance. The Government may indeed, as the Coalition charges, want to gut the private health sector. Given it is heavily staffed with former Liberals, it wouldn’t be surprising if they did. But the party of Medicare will need the health insurance industry until it realises relying on queuing as the primary means of managing health care demand is an efficient relic of Soviet-era communism. Then again, there’s probably no reason for Labor to think that when it’s unlikely Australians ever will. As for Steve Fielding, who appears wholly out of his depth, perhaps he should simply join the Coalition and make life easier for everyone, including himself. He might even have a faint chance of getting re-elected in 2010. |
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24 Comments
Despite all the standard vitriol Steve Fielding (and JamesK) are spot on.
It is basic math really - reduce private healthcare, increase strain on public hospitals. I know Marilyn lives in a workers utopia, but in real world Sydney doctors have practices in both private and public hospitals. Private hospitals are well attended as insurance covers the hospital bed. Public hospitals also ask if you have private cover & encourage you to go private if the problem non life threatening. Stack more people into public and you just get longer waiting lists.
By the way: Could the comrades tell me how many votes did the great Bob Brown first get to Canberra on ?
I wager it was a good number less than Steve Fielding (are there people even living in Tasmania ?).
Now thats a rort I can appreciate, and so should all of you…
JimmyK with another ill informed rant who didn’t bother to read the article.
People with private insurance rock up to public health emergency rooms for the simple reason that private hospitals do not cater for such things, they consider them decidely unAustralian.
It is an absurd proposition to force people to take out health care when health care is freely available.
Quite frankly Kerry, yours is typical of the rubbish that is peddled as opinion worthy of note, which it very clearly is not.
Not a fact, not an argument, not even an informed opinion not dressed up as fact certainly not even an honestly given informed opinion just dross…..
I have never posted on a Bolt or an Akerman blog but don’t let a fact get in the way of the poisonous fantasy world between your ears. A space occupied by at least some grey matter in most other people but not you nor your ilk.
I’m tired of the bilge gushing from soulless drones such as yourself on these pages. If you have nought to contribute as is patently the case then spare us the bilge
And Bernard Keane….. Fielding it would seem is a lot less out of his depth than you on this topic at least.
You need to do more homework.
One day you will write for a more intelligent audience.
The greatest joy I would get out of a double dissolution would be the immediate disappearance of Fielding. All he stands for are tax cuts and handouts for people who think having four, five, ten kids entitles them to something more than a free vasectomy. At least Xenophon provides a rational basis for his votes - Fielding has shown he will prostitute every one of his votes to shore up his (non-existent) voting base. I never thought I’d say it - but I reckon the last twelve months have shown the Greens worthy of holding the balance of power in their own right.
Having watched Steve Fieldings father fall asleep-mid-conversation- on more than one occasion, at my parental home and having listened to my parents describe the perpetual pot of boiled potatoes to feed Steve’s 17 siblings - I think it was seventeen although I am not sure because as a child I failed to recognise Steve’s mother Shirley unless she was pregnant (her usual state) - and the description of the two houses side by side with the fence torn down between them and the younger kids in the one house with George and Shirley while the older kids looked after themselves in the other house, and the fact that George worked two or three jobs to pay for them all, I am tempted to ask Steve who paid for his and his siblings birth and medical care ??????? If it were left up to George and Shirley maybe Steve would not take Goverment subsidised health care so much for granted. Or maybe it is just self assertion that he has learned about contraception and risen above his past?? Or maybe it’s just that, beyond Catholicism, Steve is way out of his depth when it comes to politics. Who voted for stupid Steve anyway ?????
Though a middle-income earner I have always been philosophically opposed to health care via medi-business rather than medicare, and have voluntarily endured the extra slug of the medicare levy of over $1600 per year from a position of a true believer. With the new Rudd governments announcement that it would raise the threshold income I dared to believe that my dogged comittment would at long last be rewarded. Then Steve Fielding came along. With the election of a new government there is always a hope for a while of a better world to come, but it seems the miasmic stench of the old one is rising inexorably, even to the continuing antics in Question Time. What does it take to hose out the old closet?
The Liberals never forget the filth tactics which have worked for them in the past. During the end of the Whitlam years they found another lonely little senator from QLD. Called, ironically, Senator Field. They buttered him up, to the stage of one tickle and he bowed, prior to jumping to do the Libs bidding. The Liberals ultimate coup was to batten on to a serial drunk called John Kerr: the rest was history.
Now they have discovered another anonymous little man with a huge ego (the fact that he got to the job via Labor preferences, and one sixth of the vote can only be blamed on themselves). Unfortunately Labor doesn’t really understand the art of partially garrotting the victim’s throat, The Art form of racking the victim until they are six inches taller, then eviscerating what’s left. If there is anything left after that , it will be to be tied to a stake and burned. All these neat little tricks-taught to the Liberals by the then DLP, aka Opus Dei.- and the Catholic vote)-. Years of learning about the inquisition have payed off handsomely, ask Tony Abbott!
So it is still the same old story, a fight for a desperate political party, which cannot conceive that the voters
didn’t want them. Moreover, it’s a party which has learned nothing in the short time it has been sobbing and pouting in the wilderness. Tony Abbott, I hear what used to be your daily fix of public recognition, just isn’t being supplied, in the wilderness. God! Life is tough. If the Liberals force a double dissolution, they will regret it. The electorate has grown up recently and we won’t bloody stand for your out of date views beibg thrust down our throats.
Steven Fielding doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to make a big decision. I agree with Dave regarding unrepresentative swill and to carry it on further in the Keating vein, with decisions like this Fielding’s brain is like a bird’s nest, all sticks and shit.
Colin
This bloke got 2,600 votes and he has the temerity to think that he can impose a tax burden on hundreds of thousands of people. He sounded pretty shrill trying to defend himself today and I doubt he will be able to withstand the outrage he has created.
He is behaving like a parliamentary novice and he will have to improve his act markedly if he hopes to still be there next time around.
The massive government funding of the totally inefficient private health insurance system makes my blood boil. If the (far too numerous) health insurance companies actually provided a product worth buying then people wouldn’t need to be forced into their hopeless ‘insurance’. They claimed at the beginning of this massive rort that the influx of new customers would force premiums down. When the opposite happened they said that the new customers kept making claims (doh!) so premiums had to rise - now they are saying these same claimants leaving will again push premiums up! Most of the taxpayers money seems to go on their brainless advertising anyway. Why is it that ‘market forces’ only apply on a case by case basis?
As for Fielding, he is so obviously a defender of the rich with a very small brain that he would be a perfect fit for a shadow cabinet position.
The notion of the patient as a customer (demanding appropriate satisfaction despite lacking the medical knowledge to know what this might be) rather than as someone seeking and receiving medical attention determined purely on the basis of medical opinion and sensible resource allocation is inherently flawed. So much private health funding goes on designer glasses frames and unnecessary treatments that it’s just stupid. If people want to pay for their own medical treatment that’s fine, but why force families into this system just because both halves of a couple earn $50K each?
Marilyn: “It is an absurd proposition to force people to take out health care when health care is freely available”
Marilyn who are well beyond merely stupid and well beyond merely ignorant…….
Well I’m not going to knock a personal philosophy but that is not the point of Bernard’s article, is it?.
I know what mine is. I pay PHI because I want to be in charge of my health care. Keating wanted to be in charge of his and his family’s health care as well. No problem with that. Just don’t espouse one thing and live another.
I wonder if Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd would allow their seriously ill family members into public health?
I doubt it because they are knowingly making it worse to score political points …….. and the suckers fall for it every time.
Yet another advertisement for the Liberal Party from the doyen of their stacked bloggers James K dipstick.
But keep him on, he provides comedy in serious times. Not good comedy, just your everyday toilet humour.
Actually I retract that Bernard Keane.
You do 10 articles a week which is an incredible workload.
I actually think you do amazingly well.
I would seek to read you wherever you were published.
JamesK is correct insofar as the issues of the current budgetary position of the public hospital system is concerned, but conveniently ignores the Howard Government’s ideologically driven cuts to the same budgets in favour of the private health insurance industry. He talks maths but also ignores the mathematical reality that the Medicare levy threshold in question has been subject to massive bracket creep over the years. I repeat my original point: private health insurance is all well and good for folks who want to pay for it, but the patient as a customer (with all of the associated expectations) is a much more expensive proposition than the patient as a recipient of sound medical advice in a system which allocates resources based on medical reality.
The egregious Steve Fielding is a nothing more than fellow traveller of the Liberal Party who had to start a new party that pretends to be different, because even the Liberal Party wouldn’t preselect him if he were one of them. A sort of poor man’s Vince Gair, without Gair’s character and sense of humour. Vince at least had some sort of intelligence and never took himself too seriously. Fielding is so utterly transparent, self important , publicity seeking and illogical that he falls to even lower levels than the infamous Albert Field. Remember him?
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Unrepresentative swill most definitely!
Quite frankly when it comes to the opinions of the big noter, James thingie…I just dont give a damn. The stench of the Bolt/Akerman blogs of which he is a constant contributor, now pervades this spot.
Dave Liberts, it is not the ethics or prescription glasses that is the problem here.
It is funding of public hospitals.
Assuming you accept it is at bursting point (97% bed occupancy here in Victoria and probably not much better elsewhere. The recommended occupancy rate is no greater than 84%), then how will it get any better by causing 1 million people to cross over to the public system?
Note there is no funding in the budget to pay for an increase in public hospital beds. You would need to build new hospitals and staff them. Where is the budget funding for that?
I notice the usual suspects aka the restless ignorant rabble headed by Marilyn and David mouthing off again, demonstrating their ignorance but that does not change the fact that this bad policy.
And public hospitals are state health responsibility. NSW hospitals are widely held to be beyond crisis point. Add another million to the waiting lists and emergency corridors and see the vermin squeal……..Marilyn and David again……outraged!
The more rabid they become, the more you can comfortably predict that they are incorrect.
I notice Fielding bashing is a sport in Crikey but he is actually doing the right thing here and is acting in the best interests of low income people who depend totally on the public health system and have no choice.
Good on him!
The Senator supposedly representing families has a strange notion as to what his job in the Senante is all about. Of course if being an idiot was one of the requirements, there is no question he passes the test. If being a lacky for the Liberals he again passes the test. If knowing nothing about what families in this country really need and how not to assist them, he succeeds. But now taking over the role of a dictator and using his power of vote in the Senate without intelligent knowledge and the consequences of his actions is deplorable. Millions did not vote for this odd person who holds himself up as a shining light for all that is good, decent and wholesom, when in reality he is a publicity seeking, egotistical, lame brain who is living in a world of his own where suddenly power and the direction of this country heads is in his spooked head.
The Liberals should be fearful of the monster they have created. What does power do to an individual? Indeed it does.
I’m heartily sick of Senator Fielding throwing his weight around, talk about unrepresentative swill…his importnace far outwieghts his vote or his contribution….
As you say the ALP have only themselves to blame. Fancy doing a preference swap with Fielding in the first place. I am finding it difficult to find too many real differences between them and the Coalition these days.
As for private health premiums haven’t they continually increased in cost anyway? I think reasons were cited such as ‘more people using the service would naturally increase costs’ and in fact wasn’t the private health cover rebate introduced to help cover the rising costs?
Now it seems that reducing the membership will also result in an increase in costs. Win - win situation for the private insurers at least.
And if health insurers can’t survive without consumers being forced onto their service then how good is the service they are offering? The conservatives are always trotting out ‘choice’ and ‘individual freedom’ when it suits them, The hypocrisy is breath taking.
Most who can afford private health cover will continue regardless IMO. Those who take out minimal cover to avoid the Medicare levy surcharge will most likely be utilising the public system anyway to avoid large gap payments.
Between 1 million to 400,000 people will change from the private to the public health system as a result of these changes as estimated by numerous sources including government department estimates.
The government subsidises private health hospital as well as paying all of public hospital stays to a considerable degree so the obvious thought is so what?
Well the government will not only have to pay for increased use of public hospitals (not such a huge difference) but will have to significantly pay for increased infrastructure costs for new hospitals and new staff and of course that is not the Commonwealth but the States and……..oh dear………… and we are taljking big money not budgeted for. The public system will get worse not better.
It is an example of unplanned knee jerk stupid Labor budgetary rationale and Fielding is to be congratulated for voting this silliness down