Turns out, taking six years and $24.2m to get a grand total of 101 entries is not a winning strategy. Labor promises to change that.
The government’s Medical Costs Finder website will be completely overhauled and will start automatically listing individual non-GP specialist fees if Labor wins a second term, federal health minister Mark Butler pledged today.
In theory, the Medical Costs Finder provides a portal for the public to compare non-GP specialist fees and have a reasonable idea of the out-of-pocket costs that they will face at their next appointment.
“The whole problem is it doesn’t really work at all,” Mr Butler said.
While the site does provide high-level data on average bulk-billing rates and out-of-pocket costs across specialties, very few doctors ever chose to publicly disclose their fees.
At time of writing there were 101 entries on the site. A number of these were multiple listings from the same practitioners.
There are around 11,000 specialists working in Australia who are eligible to upload their fees.
Medical Costs Finder was initially funded in 2019 under the Morrison Government and has received more than $24 million from the federal government so far.
Related
Mr Butler would add another $7 million to the website’s tab to pay for the “technical capability” to analyse annual Medicare, hospital and insurer data for every common medical service and display the average fee for each specific doctor alongside the national average for that service.
“We’re done with an opt-in system,” he said.
“We’re going to do it for them.
“We’re going to upload all of their fees … so that people will be able to search what ‘Doctor Smith’ charges for a knee replacement.”
The minister would not be drawn on whether he thought non-GP specialists were overcharging, but said it was “clearly the case” that they were “charging very high fees”.
AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen pointed out that the underlying Medicare rebates for specialists were never restored following the Medicare freeze, nor have there been significant investments to specialist rebates by successive governments.
“While it’s a great idea, [Medical Costs Finder] has been really laborious for doctors to be able to upload their own information and it didn’t do a great job,” she told The Medical Republic.
“It [also] didn’t adequately express what the insurance company contributions were for different products.
“As our private health insurance report card shows, for the same procedure at the same hospital and the same doctor, two different insurance companies can have quite different contributions which impacts on patient costs.”
An upgraded website would also include data from private health insurers showing their financial arrangements with specialists.
Much like doctors, Mr Butler noted, insurers have been reluctant to voluntarily disclose information on how often and how much patients pay out-of-pocket for services that aren’t fully covered.
Only three insurers have done so thus far.
Private Healthcare Australia CEO Dr Rachel David told TMR that the peak body for health insurers had been calling for mandatory listing of all doctor fees for some time.
“We think that because the standard of medical specialist practice in Australia is so high and the bar to become a medical specialist is set high and there’s a lot of ongoing monitoring, that it is quite reasonable for people to want to compare a medical specialist based on price,” she said.
“And, in fact, the amount that you pay to see a medical specialist is completely unrelated to the quality of care and the outcome you get.”
The upside for PHA, she said, would be for private health insurance customers.
“Firstly, their health is improved because when they’re referred to a specialist, they’re actually attending because they’re not frightened of what it might cost them,” Dr David said.
“Secondly, they … feel more empowered and if price is important to them – and there is a segment of people seeking private healthcare for whom price is the most important issue – they are given that additional choice.”
