The AMA has called for this year's federal budget to be a health budget, which must address the fact that the Medicare rebate has failed to keep up with rising practice costs.
The AMA has called for this year's federal budget to be a health budget, which must address the fact that the Medicare rebate has failed to keep up with rising practice costs.
The Medicare rebate has failed to keep up with cost-of-living rises, forcing doctors to pass on higher costs to patients, says AMA Vice President, Dr Danielle McMullen.
Dr McMullen appeared on Nine's Today Extra this week following the release of data showing that fewer than 65 per cent of Australians have all their GP appointments bulk billed.
The federal health department released a geographic breakdown of bulk-bulling data for the first time this week.
"So what this clearly shows again, and we have seen in the past few months, is how the Medicare rebate…has not really kept pace for many years," Dr McMullen said.
"Doctors have been absorbing a lot of this cost for many years. We had a frozen Medicare rebate for six years and then indexation this year was only about 1.6 per cent when we know the cost of living was much higher than that. We are now facing a time when we have to pass on those costs and we are seeing that across Australia, as the report has shown."
Dr McMullen said the May budget needed to be a strong health budget to ease pressures on the costs of accessing health care.
"The government has been saying a lot of good things in that space and we saw the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report a couple of weeks ago.
"That has a lot of important reform aspects in it. We need to see implementation of all of that. We need the budget to be a strong health budget and we need some of that funding to be immediate to make sure that we can ease that cost of accessing healthcare in the short term."
