Senator MARGETTS (10:13 PM) —Just quickly, I would put one little perspective on this. If the competitive market is used as the model for the way this particular measure will work, you have to keep in mind that a competitive model works on full information. So I guess that people actually would have to go off and find out the information from the various health funds.

But also with the ability to quickly transfer, I believe—and, okay, these are my personal feelings—that people generally stick with a fund, unless they make a major decision to change. If I am not mistaken, that usually happens because there are substantial penalties with what you can claim and what you cannot claim. I do not know that you can transfer those over from one fund to another, but for many kinds of health care you have to wait a certain number of years.

The private health insurance market operates in such a way that people will not transfer from one fund to the other, like in superannuation, because they are concerned about losing benefits they have to wait several years to obtain. The reality is that this market does not operate in the way a lot of other markets operate—not even in the way superannuation funds operate—and we have to keep those issues in mind when we think about incentives we are offering to create a market situation or to keep people in a market. It might have an impact on attracting new people to the market, but this has been unproven in all the statistics we have been asked to believe. In reality, it will not necessarily operate as a real market incentive for those existing clients of health insurance, because you are unable to easily move from one fund to the other without losing some of the benefits you have to wait for.