Far from doctors rorting $8 billion from Medicare, the government has managed to save $8 billion through inadequate indexation.
The AMA believe they’ve found the mythical lump of Medicare money recently reported missing in a joint investigation by the ABC and Nine Newspapers.
And as anyone who has lost and found a pair of socks can attest, things turn up in the darndest places.
In this case, the money – a cool $8.6bn over 28 years – could be found in government savings.
According to an AMA analysis, failure to properly index the Level B consultation item to the Consumer Price Index and average weekly earnings between 1994 and 2022 has saved the government $8.6bn in total.
It’s not about what’s leaking out of Medicare, but what was simply never put into Medicare in the first place.
“The Medicare rebate is the patient rebate, not the doctor’s rebate, and therefore reflects what the government is willing to pay for Australians’ healthcare,” AMA president Professor Stephen Robson said.
“Our analysis shows that successive governments have been stripping healthcare funding from Australian taxpayers through poor indexation and shifting the cost of care onto everyday Australians.”
The AMA’s report comes just one week after Health Minister Mark Butler announced his team had found “no evidence” of the $8bn in Medicare fraud and inappropriate billings alleged by the ABC and Nine Newspapers.
Mr Butler also announced an independent review of the integrity of Medicare and its compliance mechanisms, which will be handed down in late February 2023.
Earlier this week, shadow health minister Anne Ruston asked health officials during Senate estimates if there were adequate measures in place to address the “significant impact” on GPs of negative media coverage.
Bringing the Level B rebate back up to its true value, the AMA said, will cost about $5bn over four years.
The association proposes a revised indexation tool to ensure rebates better reflect the rising cost of providing care and running a practice, which will in turn reduce patient out-of-pocket costs and encourage more engagement with primary health services.
“Implementation of the revised indexation tool should prioritise those services where there has been a decline in bulk-billing and minutes per consultation, and an increase in patient out-of-pocket costs, as these may be the areas where the rebate does not sufficiently support the delivery of high-quality and holistic services,” the AMA said.
In its calculations, the AMA used a simple index with 70% weight based on the average weekly earnings and 30% weight based on the CPI.
Of all the broad types of service categories, general practice items would cost the most to fix, amounting to about $1.7bn over four years.
Diagnostic imaging and pathology items – the latter of which have not been indexed in recent years – are the two runners-up, coming in at $1bn and $700m respectively.
At the other end of the scale, items covering obstetrics and assistance at operations would cost the least to index, at a combined total of around $60m.
