Fielding crows atop the muck heap

Like a skinny rooster crowing on top of a muck heap, the unrepresentative Senator Steve 'I'm the boss of you' Fielding, uses his balance of power position to redraft the already shonky Medicare logo until it begins to look like the one on the left.

This lone Family First member of the federal parliament is becoming a figure of fun because of his juvenile publicity stunts and truly loathed for his frankly ill-informed stance on many issues.

The Age captures him nicely:

"FAMILY First Senator Steve Fielding seems the least likely figure to become a one-man government.
He is gaunt and harried-looking and darts from newspaper office to TV studio in Canberra's Parliament House with the urgency of a man pursued by the terror of letting a chance slip by."

Elsewhere it points out that Fielding brought a pup when he brought the argument put up by the Coalition and medical insurers to fight the Rudd Government's Medicare bill:

"The Howard government introduced three principal measures to boost the coverage of health insurance. The levy surcharge was introduced on July 1, 1997, (when coverage was 32%) but did not stop its membership decline. Two years later (June 1999) coverage was 30.6%. The taxpayer-funded rebate on the cost of private health insurance was introduced on January 1, 1999, with additional rebates for those aged over 65 from April 1, 2005. The rebate managed to persuade only an additional 0.8% of the population to take out private health insurance in its first year. Lifetime health cover was introduced from July 1, 2000, under which people joining funds are penalised an additional 2% of the premium for every year they delay joining above the age of 30. Of all these measures, it was lifetime health cover (the one that cost taxpayers nothing) that had the biggest impact — health insurance cover rose from 32.2% in March 2000 to 45.8% in September 2000. If the surcharge didn't encourage anyone to take up health insurance, why would its adjustment induce an exodus?"

For some strange reason known only to himself Fielding appears to believe that the only thing which will raise the cost of medical insurance in the immediate future is the raising of the surcharge threshold to $75,000 for singles and $150,000 for couples.

The medical insurers are laughing all the way to the bank now he has needlessly locked around 330,000 people into private insurance schemes, but their retention on the books will not stop insurance rates rising because in the end they are not an expansion of business.

Perhaps Steve should remember that in much of this country skinny roosters end up in the Sunday pot.

Logo is from Evidence Based Only.