Aged Care Minister accused of dodging responsibility over fees and care packages

Shadow Health and Aged Care Minister Anne Ruston has accused Aged Care Minister Sam Rae of refusing to accept responsibility for problems in his portfolio, saying Labor is “great with a headline but not with getting the work done” on aged care.

Senator Ruston made the comments on News24’s the Jamiee Rogers Show, where she was asked about a Daily Telegraph investigation into rising prices in the sector. The investigation reported significant mark-ups by some providers and found that a number of them were charging admin fees of up to $200 just to book a service.

Unlike the NDIS, aged care has no price caps, and the government had been expected to introduce them on 1 July before pausing the plan.

Senator Ruston said the government had “created a whopping great mess”. She said older Australians who were meant to be grandfathered from their previous packages into the new system were finding that their funding was not stretching nearly as far as it once did.

“Older Australians are paying so much more for exactly the same thing that they used to be paying,” she said, adding that some were now paying 20, 30 or even 40 per cent more than before. She argued that red tape and bureaucratic burden placed on providers were ultimately being passed on to the people receiving care.

Senator Ruston called on the government to go back to the drawing board and take seriously the issues it was warned about when the legislation passed through parliament.

She also criticised the way care needs are being determined under the new system. According to Senator Ruston, the algorithm used to work out a person’s needs has no human override, and the Minister has resisted suggestions that it is flawed. She said some Australians were being told their care needs were well below what a clinical assessor had found after sitting down with them in person.

“This is a government that’s great with the headline, but not very good at actually getting their rolling their sleeves up,” she said, adding that the goal should be care delivered when people need it at a price that is affordable for both the older person and the taxpayers who fund most of the system.

The interview also turned to the Prime Minister’s recent comments on budget savings. Anthony Albanese pointed to changes to the private health insurance rebate, which would mean a 65-year-old is treated the same as a 64-year-old, and said the Coalition could not call for savings while opposing every one proposed.

Senator Ruston said the change was a cost shift rather than a genuine saving, with the burden moving from the federal budget to state and territory budgets and into the pockets of older Australians. She noted that half of older Australians are pensioners, a group she said could ill afford further cost of living pressure.