Any move towards allowing private life insurance companies to take a greater role in worker rehabilitation including via income protection and total permanent disability (TPD) would represent a move towards privatisation, according to the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).
The ACTU has used a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services to warn against the move being pushed by the Financial Services Council (FSC) and some superannuation funds arguing it would undermine the expansion of the public health system.
As well, it claimed such a move would undermine the universality of access and coverage and primarily public nature of the workers’ compensation system.
The peak union body also claimed it would shift the cost of workers’ compensation from the employer to the worker.
The submission said the move would “impact superannuation costs as superannuation funds are required to withdraw money from the general fund in order to meet legitimate claim costs that the insurance companies underwriting their policies refuse to pay, as has often been the case”.
The ACTU submission claimed that the proposal being put forward by the FSC had “not been born of the concerns of injured workers but rather appears to have resulted from a push by the private life insurance industry to reduce costs and ultimately expand its market”.
It said that it believed the FSC proposal represented the first stage of achieving a broader objective of expanding the private insurance market “by coercively substituting public health care and employer-funded workers’ compensation with individually-funded private insurance”.
