ONE must question the wisdom of the federal government in its proposed sale of its health insurance provider Medibank Private (The Examiner, August 30), for it has proved to be an annual profit cash for the government since its inception, providing competitive rates against other major health insurance provides.
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Yet Finance Minister Mathias Cormann states it will remove the current conflict where the government is both regulator of private health insurance as well as a large market participant.
This may be so, but with Medibank going down the same path as former government-owned profitable commodities such as Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank (with its imminent listing on the Australia Securities Exchange by the end of the year) it may eventually be a case of the government having nothing more to sell.
Owning profit-making businesses is money in the bank, here endeth the lesson.
— ROBERT LEE, Summerhill.