MEMBER for Mallee Andrew Broad has rejected a call to lift the amount of money paid to doctors through Medicare.
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Mr Broad acknowledged that inflation would at some point require consultation payments to be lifted to support bulk billing rates.
The previous Labor federal government introduced the rebate freeze in 2013 as a temporary budget savings measure.
The Coalition maintained the freeze and saved billions of dollars but created a conflict with general practitioners and the Australian Medical Association.
For the past three years, general practitioners have only had one increase in what they are paid for seeing bulk-billed patients despite inflation running at up to three per cent a year.
About 30 per cent of surveyed doctors said clinic costs had risen so much that they abandoned bulk billing for non-concession patients.
Association president Dr Michael Gannon this week called for Medicare rebates freeze to be lifted in the new term of government.
“"I would be gobsmacked if the government took an ongoing freeze to the next election,” Dr Gannon said.
“They got the scare of their life on health and that was probably the policy which hurt them the most.
“It makes general practice and a lot of other areas of medical practice potentially unviable.”
Mr Broad said the freeze on rebates was not significant and had not affected bulk billing.
“The Medicare rebate freeze doesn’t mean that we are paying less into Medicare, it means that we are not indexing it at the consumer price index,” he said.
“In real terms, doctors are getting 60 cents less as result of the freeze.
“You would think that the freeze would lead to less bulk billing and more patients having to pay a gap, but statistically that hasn’t been the case.”
Mr Broad said there was hard evidence to support his bulk billing claims.
“Bulk billing rates are sitting at 84 per cent and so bulk billing has actually increased while the rebate freeze has been on,” he said.
“Long-term, you would think that the correlation would come back the other way, but currently bulk billing rates are high. It’s not just a claim made by pollies.”
Mr Broad pointed to an ABC Fact Check that found national bulk billing rates had gone up by four per cent under the Coalition.
The ABC found that an increase in the number of pensioners could have also contributed to higher demand for bulk billing.
Mr Broad said the government would have to look at medicare rebates if the rates of bulk billing started to decline.
“I don’t think a freeze on an indexation on a rebate can be there forever,” he said.
“But I also don’t think we should have open reign for doctors to click a ticket and charge as much as they want.
“The average doctor still makes a good lot of money, particularly in what I’ll call supermarket clinics that just churn through patients that are all bulk-billed, earning $400 per hour.”