GPs are warning that your days of finding a bulk-billing doctor could be numbered.
They say that without a major injection of Medicare funding, the bulk-billing system will crash and patients will be forced to pay hefty out-of-pocket fees.
Some doctors have accused the federal government of continuing the Coalition’s nearly decade-long funding freeze, and argue that a whopping hike of 10 per cent is needed after years of neglect.
Dr Bruce Willett has treated patients in Brisbane for decades and has looked after generations of families.
He said the current funding system had put doctors in an impossible position – keep their business going or treat their patients.
“We’re really concerned for our patients and have really tried hard to keep up bulk-billing to support those patients to obtain the health they need,” he said.
Dr Willett is also the vice-president of the Royal Australian College of GPs and said his struggles were becoming more common around the country as inflation pushes operating costs up, leaving a gaping hole in the budgets of practices.
“It’s just got to breaking point where we’re no longer able to do it,” he said.
Last month, the new Labor government increased the Medicare rebate by 1.6 per cent, but Dr Willett said that was essentially nothing compared with the country’s inflation rate of 6.1 per cent.
“It’s a continuation of the ‘freeze by stealth’, and that’s been the problem for the last couple of decades,” he said.
Labor introduced the Medicare rebate freeze in 2013 as a temporary savings measure and it has been kept in place by the Coalition ever since.
“It does need now some significant increases,” Dr Willett said.
“We’re certainly calling for at least a 10 per cent increase, particularly for the longer consultations.
“The way that Medicare is structured at the moment, unfortunately it tends to favour shorter consultations, and we’re seeing increasing levels of mental illness, increasing levels of multiple chronic illness and that just takes time to work through.”
Fewer doctors offer bulk-billing
A recent survey of hundreds of GPs by private professional education company for doctors HealthEd found more than one in five had recently changed their billing model.
Peter Stratmann, from the Primary Care Business Council, said the statistics from his members also showed a clear decline in how much bulk-billing was happening.
“We have 500 practices and 5000 doctors in our group and those doctors complete somewhere around 23 to 24 million consultations a year, and our data has been that that bulk-billing rate has been diminishing from somewhere around the 70 per cent mark, somewhere to the low 60s,” he said.
Mr Stratmann argued there was no doubt the bulk-billing rate needed to increase, but pointed out funding support to run the clinics themselves needed to be boosted too.
He said there was also a doctor shortage to worry about.
“There are two major storms that are colliding here. One is funding in general – that’s for the nature of the consultations themselves – but also that’s coinciding with the need to support the infrastructure that practices require in order to operate.
“The other perfect storm is the workforce shortage whereby we clearly are losing the doctors we need to cover the population demands.”
‘The new health minister gets it’
Danielle McMullen from the Australian Medical Association would not be drawn on how much funding should be boosted, but said there were signs the federal government would do what was necessary to fix the looming bulk-billing crisis.
“We do think the new health minister gets it,” she said.
“He has said many times now that general practice is one of his top two priorities, and we’re working together through things like the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce to find ways to modernise Medicare, make it fit for purpose now.
“Now look, it won’t be the solution to everything by December, we see this as just the start, but we are hopeful there are some measures being undertaken to improve the state of play in general practice and make sure that patients have access to care.”
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