We have a system that attempts to force young people to take out a private insurance policy they don’t want or particularly need in order to fund the use of it by older people. As the Centre for Policy Development research fellow Ian McAuley told Melissa Davey last year, it is essentially “transferring funds from the young to the old”.

We have a public and private health mix in Australia, but consistently over the past 40 years people have revealed through their spending choices they prefer the public system.

And yet rather than pick the winner, governments of both persuasion have attempted to prop up the private sector. And as ever the private system has taken advantage – offering less coverage while complaining about needing ever more government assistance.

via Is private health insurance a con? The answer is in the graphs | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian