If the Treasurer wants to fight inflation, he should be looking closely at the health sector, where hospital and medical service costs have been rising well above the CPI.
Much of this comes from private health insurance, which has been rising at 6.4% a year since 2001.
Advice to our Treasurer: get rid of support for private insurers; there is no case for subsidising a financial intermediary imposing a $1 billion overhead on our health system and contributing to inflation.
If you want to support private hospitals (there is a good case for doing so), support them directly, with incentives to compete with public hospitals.
Would private hospitals support this reform?
What else could help control escalating health costs?