Yet again, Australia’s private hospitals and health insurers are at each other’s throats. As The Australian Financial Review has reported, Catholic Health Australia, representing 63 Catholic hospitals, seeks Australian Competition and Consumer Commission authorisation effectively to represent member hospitals in contract renegotiations with insurers, while blocking five big insurers, including listed companies Medibank Private and Nib, from entering contracts with individual Catholic hospitals as “collective” discussions take place.

Private hospital operators, and even big for-profit ones such as Ramsay and Healthscope, routinely claim they are saints in the dysfunctional relationship between hospital operators and insurers, and that insurers are rapacious sinners.