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Dr Andrew Gunn
Published in The Courier-Mail 10 March 2003
“Collusion on rebate”
The Federal Government and AMA collude to obscure certain facts. The
rebate for a standard GP consultation is $25 but the AMA says it should
be $50.
The Government then uses the AMA’s figure to calculate that
raising the rebate, a suggestion of the ALP, would cost billions.
Bulk-billing provides a gross income of about $200,000 pa for a typical
GP seeing about 160 patients a week. A large slice of this money
disappears in various practice costs and this can leave the real income
of bulk billing GPs in the order of $100,000 per annum. Charging an
extra $25 per consultation, as proposed by the AMA, creates a pay
increase of $200,000 per annum.
Increasing the rebate for bulk-billed consultations to the schedule fee,
an extra $4 per consultation, would provide a pay boost of over $30,000per annum.
The AMA may describe this increase as “insulting” but many GPs could
return to bulk-billing for such a sum.
The cost to the Government would be several hundred million dollars, a
fraction of the cost of the private health insurance rebate or various
other schemes they are floating.
By not supporting the bulk-billing rebate and restricting GP provider
numbers, the Government engineered the collapse in bulk billing.
The Government could now reverse it but for reasons of ideology, rather
than economics, it doesn't want to.
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