One million Australians missing specialist doctor appointments due to cost, report finds
One million Australians missing specialist doctor appointments due to cost, report finds
Medicare used to be a point of pride for us as a nation, now it's more of an embarrassment. We're making fantastic progress on our path to becoming America Junior.
IMO there needs to be some regulation around this, a simple measure would be to tie Medicare payments to a pricing structure(eg. a specialist can only charge the Medicare rebate + 20%).
If a specialist wants to charge more then that's fine but the patient(or insurance) will have to pay the full cost
Seeing a professor for a complex health issue: $600
Medicare rebate: $80
Private health: $0
Medicare needs to do a LOT better for that to work
Yes, obviously medicare would need to increase the rebate and private insurance fees would necessarily increase(as they would now be actually paying for care rather than acting a a gatekeeping mechanism)
Rebate for a short consult with a specialist is $81.55, a long consult is $236.65.
The title professor indicates that they hold a teaching position and says nothing about their clinical skill. Plenty of specialists take the piss and leverage the title to charge ridiculous fees.
In my experience as a GP a reasonable standard fee for a specialist is around $300 with $80 back from Medicare. So yes the Medicare rebate would need to increase substantially but I doubt more than we will save when AUKUS falls through. It is within the capacity of a government with the right priorities. Also increasing the availability of public specialists would be a good companion policy.
Part of the problem is that private health exists, but it can't cover you for anything other than hospital.
"Extras" aren't really insurance, it's a incentive scheme but you basically pay whatever you're using at cost.
The solution here is not to allow private health to cover the gap between Medicare and the out of pocket cost. The solution is to say, if you charge more than the rebate then it's 100% private, you won't get a cent of Medicare.
Watch as private healthcare absolutely bottoms out because they'll actually have to cover the whole cost, and therefore premiums will rise like crazy.
How we we afford this? We're already affording it. We subsidise private health, we pay insurance premiums. If you can convince people: oh hey, want cheaper health insurance? Oh hey, what's this? You can pay LESS in universal healthcare than you do in premiums!
Lots of people would go for it. A lot of us have private health insurance because of how the incentives are currently set up. We don't want it. Before the tax concessions no one wanted it.
You'd have to couple it with a massive investment in Medicare, completely removing all tax concessions for private health (which they should have never implemented in the first place). Better pay for medicos.
But we can damn well afford it now, just that it's politically difficult, especially with the corporate media, and everyone wanting taxes to go down (which I personally think is dumb as fuck).
We need to put private health in the bin where I belongs. Hybrid systems are shit.
I second this, but make it +0% or else 100% private.
Honestly, we need most medicos to be employees (of the government), and they can start a union to keep conditions and pay appropriate.
Our subsidy system is just funneling money into practice owner's pockets, who set prices based on supply and demand, which is a fucked way to run a healthcare system.
Let's just pay the average medico more, while skipping all the profits were subsidising.
I used to go to the dentist for annual check ups. Now I have been since 2021. That kind of thing has become a luxury that “one day I’ll have money for it again”.