Health insurer Medibank Private Ltd (ASX: MPL) recently grew its half-year profit by 58%, although revenues only lifted 4.6%.
An important driver of health insurance revenues are legislated increases in insurance premiums allocated by the government. In my coverage of Medibank's results I warned readers that future premium increases are likely to be much lower than in the past, as a result of government reluctance to lift premiums by as much as insurers want.
In its recent submission to the Commonwealth review of the healthcare system, Medibank identified several ways to reduce waste in the healthcare system that would likely, as a side effect, result in increased customers for the insurer.
Here are several key recommendations and the potential savings from Medibank's submission:
- Improve information-sharing for consumers and insurers
- Standardise simpler products and terminology ($150-$330m p.a.)
- End cost-shifting from public hospitals to privately insured consumers ($1.05bn p.a.)
- Introduce reference pricing system to reduce costs of prostheses ($800m p.a.)
- Reduce hospital default costs ($610m p.a.)
- Improve competition and premium setting ($200m p.a.)
- Reward under-30s for early uptake of health insurance ($100m p.a.)
According to Medibank's figures, 500,000 Australians downgraded or cancelled their health insurance in 2015 as a result of spiralling premiums. In 2011-2012, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 9.7 million adults (57% of people aged 18 and over) had private health insurance.
Thus if Medibank's figures are correct, approximately 5% of the total number of private health customers reduced or cancelled their cover in 2015. This is a big hit and appears to confirm Medibank's own assertion that affordability is 'becoming critical' for customers.
Depending on the change to statistics since 2012, there could also be room for growth in the total number of individuals with private health insurance. With up to $3bn in waste to be cut from the system, lower costs should entice a number of lapsed and even new members to improve their private health cover.
Additional initiatives such as discounts for under-30s, superannuation-style programs that pay premiums after retirements, and insurance products that provide rest-of-life cover for an up-front payment could potentially draw many more customers into the private health insurance sphere.
So while Medibank and other insurers may not expect great premium increases in coming years, there appears to be plenty of room for them to grow revenues by attracting more customers. The caveat is that some or none of the proposed changes to the healthcare system may make it off the drawing board.
