If we are to believe the words of former Qantas high-flyer and current Healthscope boss Tino La Spina, there remains no love lost between the failed private hospital operator and private health insurers like BUPA – a potential suitor – whom La Spina accuses of playing a role in Healthscope’s collapse last month.

La Spina describes as “abhorrent” the way private health insurers underfunded private hospital operators like Healthscope and were now allegedly trying to “pick it up on the cheap when they … contributed to the situation,” he said in a private chat with doctors, first reported by The Australian Financial Review.

“Over my dead body,” was his reply when asked if BUPA could acquire Healthscope’s operations.

Healthscope boss Tino La Spina at the John Fawkner hospital in Melbourne’s Coburg, flanked by the recently appointed receivers and Healthscope executives. Credit: Eamon Gallagher

Anyone looking for a grain of salt to take with this prognosis that private health insurers are the cause of Healthscope’s woes only needs to look across to its larger, and solvent, rival: the $9 billion Ramsay Health Care.

But nobody is pretending that the industry is in a healthy state.

“The system is staring into the abyss,” Chris Blake, the chief executive of St Vincent’s Health Australia, says.

While St Vincent’s is reported to be among the parties interested in Healthscope’s hospitals,........

© Brisbane Times