NSW the worst state for 'queue jumping' private hospital patients, lobby says

This "queue jumping" has hit record levels - with NSW worse than any other state - the Australian Private Hospitals Association (APHA) and Catholic Health Australia (CHA) said.

APHA chief executive Brett Heffernan said state governments were to blame for nearly 300,000 public patients "ramped" on waiting lists across Australia.

"If state governments prioritised public patients, waiting lists might soon not exist and ramping could be a thing of the past as more beds are freed up from those jumping the queue," Mr Heffernan said.

NSW had the longest planned surgery waiting list of any state, with 93,712 patients waiting for surgery.

A NSW Health spokesperson said the department was "committed to ensuring people across NSW have access to safe, high-quality, timely health care, including surgery".

"The majority (85.3 per cent) of patients in NSW hospitals received their planned surgery within clinically recommended timeframes, with NSW the best performing jurisdiction in Australia," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also said surgery allocation was "prioritised based on clinical urgency" and public/private status did "not impact prioritisation of care".

But APHA and CHA said the only way to fix the queue jumping and waiting list backlog was to ban federal funding for private patients in public hospitals.

The federal and state governments are currently negotiating the next National Health Reform Agreement, which determines how public hospitals are funded. The private hospital lobby wants a clause in the new agreement pushing private patients into the private system.

The private hospital lobby said state health departments were admitting "massive and disproportionate" numbers of private patients into public hospitals.

The lobby said this influx was pushing public patients down the queue, forcing more and more to wait longer than the clinically recommended time for their surgery.

The percentage of private patients being treated in public hospitals has grown by more than 50 per cent in the past decade.

Mr Heffernan said the hospital funding model, and cash-strapped governments, were to blame.

"It's no secret that state governments are addicted to the revenue they receive from privately insured patients, but when so many public patients are pushed to the back of the queue and are waiting longer than necessary for their surgery, it becomes very hard to justify," he said.

CHA health policy director Katharine Bassett said the situation undermined the public hospital system.

"Public hospitals were founded on the principle of need, not entitlement. They are meant to help people who need them most - not those who have the money and status to jump the queue," Dr Bassett said.

"The more this happens, the more the balance of our health system breaks down. Public patients wait longer while private hospitals struggle to remain viable."

The lobby said private patients in the public system were an unfair burden on Australian taxpayers.

They said any public hospital that took on private patients ought to shoulder the gap between what Medicare and the insurer pay, rather than billing the taxpayer.

"These measures may motivate state governments to pay more than lip-service to public hospital waiting lists," Mr Heffernan said

"It's not unreasonable for the Federal Government to insist that public patients no longer be second-class citizens and hold states who continue to rack up disproportionate private patient caseloads to account."

NSW had the longest waiting list of any state, but also had the highest proportion of private patients within its public system.

There were 359,407 private patients in NSW public hospitals according to June 2025 data, which was 18.6 per cent of the total compared to 8.5 per cent in Queensland, 6.6 per cent in Victoria and 2.2 per cent in ACT.

The NSW Health spokesperson said NSW performed more planned surgery than any other state "while maintaining a high standard of planned surgery timeliness".

They said the overall waiting list did not necessarily mean patients were waiting longer than necessary.

"The number of patients on the waiting list at the end of June who had waited longer than clinically recommended for their surgery dropped to 2,534, down from 8,588 at the end of March 2025," they said.

ACM asked NSW Health to respond to the lobby groups' claims it was "addicted" to the revenue from private patients, but it declined to do so.

The spokesperson said NSW Health had "a range of innovative statewide strategies to further reduce planned surgery wait times, including partnerships with private hospitals where appropriate to provide the best possible outcomes to patients".

They said the NSW government had budgeted $30 million for short-stay surgery, following investments of more than $200 million since 2024 to clear the planned surgery backlog.