The government has sought to extract itself from its end-of-year policy mess by shifting responsibility for its politically disastrous GP co-payment proposal to doctors.
In an announcement with Health Minister Peter Dutton, the Prime Minister this afternoon announced the co-payment would become “optional” for doctors to charge, reinforced with a $5 per consultation cut in Medicare funding for doctors for adults without concession cards. The government “wouldn’t mind” doctors charging a co-payment to make up for the shortfall, said Abbott, in effect shifting responsibility to doctors.
The policy would work in exactly the same way as the government’s original co-payment policy, which has failed to attract support in the Senate and proven deeply unpopular with voters, except that it wouldn’t apply to children or concession card holders, nor would it apply to pathology tests. However, the government will restructure consultation guidelines for Medicare payments to further reduce payments to doctors for short consultations.
The Prime Minister appeared to admit doctors had not been consulted about the “optional co-payment” when questioned. The Australian Medical Association has been a vociferous critic of the original proposal and is unlikely to be supportive of this change, which shifts full responsibility for charging patients onto doctors under the guise of being “optional”.
Savings will still be directed to a medical research fund, which Abbott vigorously defended, demanding to know who would not be in favour of medical research. The use of savings for the research fund has undermined government efforts to sell the co-payment as necessitated by the budget situation it inherited.
I think they will actually get this one through.
It actually should have been the system they preposed originally. Going after pensioners and kids was never going to sail politically…I can’t believe they didn’t put this up as a compromise ages ago.
AMA is fine with a co-payment…they just don’t want to take a hit to their consulting fee. They lose $5 here, but it’s a lot harder to use their excuse of “think of the children/crusties/chronically sick” when they are exempt.
Can someone tell me what I am missing, the original $7 payment was to be paid by everyone and apply to everything was to raise $3.6b over forward estimates but the new policy of $5 paid only by healthy adults that aren’t concession holders and not applied to pathology etc will raise $3.5b – either healthy adults see much more of the doctor than Children, the sick and the elderly or there is another cut I am missing.
Scott – I do agree that on the face of it this will probably get through (although I will wait some analysis before committing fully) and I would think the ALP would be able to claim the credit for making it a far better policy whilst still whacking the govt for not taking it to the last election and not taking a substantila part of it to a vote in the parliament.
Can someone tell me what I am missing, the original $7 payment was to be paid by everyone and apply to everything was to raise $3.6b over forward estimates but the new policy of $5 paid only by healthy adults that aren’t concession holders and not applied to pathology etc will raise $3.5b – either healthy adults see much more of the doctor than Children, the sick and the elderly or there is another cut I am missing.
Scott – I do agree that on the face of it this will probably get through (although I will wait some ana ly sis before committing fully) and I would think the ALP would be able to claim the credit for making it a far better policy whilst still whacking the govt for not taking it to the last election and not taking a substantial part of it to a vote in the parliament
Can someone tell me what I am missing, the original $7 payment was to be paid by everyone and appl y to everything was to raise $3.6b over forward estimates but the new pol icy of $5 paid only by healthy adults that aren’t concession holders and not appl ied to pathology etc will raise $3.5b – either healthy adults see much more of the doctor than Children, the sick and the elderl y or there is another cut I am missing.
Scott – I do agree that on the face of it this will probably get through (although I will wait some ana l ysis before committing full y) and I would think the ALP would be able to claim the credit for making it a far better pol icy whilst still whacking the govt for not taking it to the last election and not taking a substantial part of it to a vote in the parl iament
I can’t imagine why this should get through, as it is only a $2 reduction of what they were pursuing all along-paying less for GP’s consultations from Medicare. Their payment hasn’t kept up since Howard anyway, which is why it is hard to find a bulk-billing GP. Wouldn’t it make more sense to charge something for a visit to a hospital emergency dept to stop them being used as alternative GP’s, and really saving the health system money which is their reported intention after all.