MLC Life Insurance has called on the Government to allow life insurers to play a greater role in worker rehabilitation, saying that it would improve workplace participation and productivity.
In a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into options for greater involvement by private sector insurers’ in worker rehabilitation, MLC Life said that regulations restricting insurers from funding medical treatment as part of rehabilitation programs should be relaxed.
It said that through income protection and total and permanent disability products, life insurers take on the liability associated with customers being unable to work for health reasons.
“Given this liability, life insurers have a strong financial motivation to support their customer’s rehabilitations and return to health and paid employment” and should be allowed to do so, the submission said.
MLC Life clarified that such an approach would not displace existing sources of healthcare funding, saying that it respected Australia’s public-private healthcare system.
Rather, it said that life insurers should have the option to act as a “supplementary funder” of medical treatment that could “top up” payments when a planned medical service was “reasonable and necessary to restoring the customer to health and employment” and Medicare or private health insurance could not provide that service.
It pointed to ongoing psychological support, substantial physiotherapy or major joint replacements with significant public hospital waiting lists as examples of such services.
MLC Life said that any reforms would need to be careful to ensure such limitations were not exceeded.
