GP fees to be paid in feelings instead of money

Medicare will replace its cash rebates for chronic care plans with a emotions-based funding model, DoHAC has announced.

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GP management plans and team care arrangements will disappear in November, but the Department of Health and Aged Care has been deliberately vague on detail because it has much bigger plans in mind.

“What we’re doing represents the biggest overhaul to chronic disease management in the past 20 years,” a DoHAC spokesperson told The Medical Republic.

“It’s a unique opportunity to do something very different. Up until now chronic disease management plans have been rewarded with money: a GP sees a patient, bills an item code and gets paid for it.

“But let’s be honest, this hasn’t been working out too well, so we’re forging ahead with plans to replace dollars with emotions.”

From 1 November, when a GP bills a chronic disease management plan they won’t get a cash payment – they’ll be rewarded with a specific emotion instead.    

“Depending on the settings, the GP could be rewarded with a feeling of ‘job well done’ or ‘a pat on the back’ or a ‘look at me, mum’, because they’ve helped their patients out.

“The emotion could be a sense of deep fulfilment or nourishing accomplishment or it could be more subtle than that. For example, GPs can choose to be rewarded with a sense of warm summer reverie like the feeling you get when listening to Phantom Handshakes, or it could be a Freudian unheimlich or even that strange wafting sense of nostalgia that you get when looking around the V&A museum.

“Of course,” DoHAC admitted, “there are endless possibilities for emotional reward, and unlike the current system they won’t cost the government a bloody fortune.”