The Minister for Health was all numbers when discussing the impact of tripled bulk-billing incentives earlier this year, but let the one-year anniversary of his policy slide by without comment.
Friday 1 November marks 12 months since the introduction of the tripled bulk-billing incentive, the centrepiece of Labor’s Strengthening Medicare policy so far.
Despite releasing out-of-cycle Medicare statistics showing an apparent increase in the GP non-referred attendance bulk-billing rate at both the two-month and six-month anniversary of the policy, Health Minister Mark Butler seems content to let the one-year mark pass without fanfare.
ABC Radio National host Patricia Karvelas questioned Mr Butler directly about the policy on Friday morning, pointing out that Australians were still struggling to find bulk-billing doctors despite the incentives.
While he insisted that the bulk-billing rate was no longer in decline, the minister did not specify any actual figure.
“Twelve months on from that huge investment, what we’ve seen most importantly is the slide in bulk billing has stopped – but really pleasingly, in every state and territory, bulk billing is on the rise again,” he said.
“Now about three out of every four visits to the GP is bulk billed.”
In previous media statements, Mr Butler has used 75.6% – the GP non-referred attendance bulk-billing rate for October 2023 – as his pre-policy implementation baseline.
Taking his comment on ABC Radio National at face value, then, it’s possible that the bulk-billing rate is now at the same level as it was one year ago.
Let’s test this hypothesis.
Medicare only releases official bulk-billing statistics quarterly, and at time of writing it has only released data up until the June quarter of 2024.
At that time, the bulk-billing rate for GP attendances was at 77.3% for the financial year to date.
This cannot be directly compared to Mr Butler’s baseline rate because it’s an average over six months rather than a point-in-time figure.
It can, however, be compared to the June 2023 year-to-date rate, which was 80.2%, suggesting a slight decrease in bulk billing over 2024.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare releases data more frequently, but measures Medicare’s contribution as a proportion of provider fees, rather than the proportion of attendances that were bulk billed.
According to its most recent update, Medicare’s contribution was at 85% in September 2024. This is exactly the same as its contribution in September 2023.
While not the exact same as bulk billing, one would expect a surge in bulk billing – i.e. more doctors accepting Medicare’s schedule fee as their full payment – to be reflected as an increase to the level of Medicare contribution.
Taking Mr Butler’s three-in-four comment alongside the latest quarterly bulk-billing rates and AIHW data, it seems likely that the bulk-billing rate for GP non-referred attendance has remained close to 75%.
Where the Minister for Health was silent on the bulk-billing rate, though, he was talkative on the topic of newly registered doctors.
This year saw 9490 new doctors registered to practice in Australia, more than half of which were international medical graduates emigrating from overseas.
Mr Butler called the increase “a big vote of confidence” and said the number of junior doctors choosing general practice “grows each year”, specifically citing this year’s uptake of rural generalist and GP trainees.
Related
This statement is technically true, so long as one only measures from 2023 onward.
The proportion of places filled on the Australian GP Training pathway did reach 95% in 2024, as opposed to 83% in 2023; but 2023 was a particularly bad year.
In both 2022 and 2021, the proportion of places filled on the AGPT sat at around 95%.
It took a dip to 89% in 2020 but had upwards of 95% of places filled in the six years before that.
The last time that all 1500 places on the AGPT were filled was 2017.
