Despite ever-rising health insurance premiums, alongside the rising cost of living more generally, the federal government has come up with further ways to worry us.

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Private health insurance is a structurally important part of our society. Australians routinely pay significant amounts of money to ensure they have access to the right care for them when and if they need it.

The deal with private health insurance was always a simple one. Pay your way and you will be rewarded for sticking with it later in life. This deal has underpinned our system for decades.

This government boldly and courageously thinks it can change the deal but keep the system working.

From April next year, their proposal is to cut the higher private health insurance rebate available to Australians aged 65 years and over.

The government calls this "modernising" the rebate and argues this is a good way of improving intergenerational equity.

The problem, of course, is that there is nothing particularly modern nor equitable about any of this. In fact, the flow on effects are completely absent from the government's thinking.

The Australians who will largely foot the bill for the government's latest budget repair exercise are pensioners in their late 70s who have paid private health insurance premiums, without interruption, for more than 50 years.

The government's preferred talking point here is that two households on the same income should get the same rebate regardless of age.

As a debating point, that sounds neat enough. As serious health policy reform for a complex system groaning under immense pressure, and with soaring costs across just about every facet of life, it just doesn't hold water.

If this legislation is passed, the federal government will strip out roughly $3 billion over four years from the premiums of older Australians. Worse, this will happen at precisely the time in their lives when they are most likely to need a hospital bed.

Many of those hospital beds belong to not-for-profit Catholic hospitals who have served their communities for decades, and which are sometimes the only private hospital for hours in any direction in regional areas.

There are three key realities that show the government can't just change the deal and........

© Canberra Times