- The Guardian
- Issue #2116
There’s a simple trick which could make you and everyone in the country healthier, but you’ll have to read to the end of this editorial to find out. No peeking!
When is free medicine not free? Some GP clinics think they have found the answer to this, by charging patients a ‘membership fee’ to access bulk billing. Around 100 GP clinics have engaged in this creative form of double-dipping, getting funding from the government that’s meant to make sure they provide a free service, while also charging patients for it. The federal health department isn’t amused and has called this creativity a breach of the Health Insurance Act.
The rort is almost amusing in its shamelessness, but it conceals a deeper problem. Bulk billing is in trouble in this country and we can not take free or affordable medicine for granted.
Australians are proud of their health system, especially when they compare it to the horrendous insurance company-dominated US system, where the motto might as well be ‘be rich or die early’. However there’s no reason we couldn’t have the same system as the US one day. Congratulating ourselves for having a better system instead of fixing the one we’ve got is no way for Australians to stay healthy.
Since it was introduced in the 1970s, Bulk Billing has been starved by successive governments which have also encouraged the entry of private health insurance and private hospitals. It’s been a vicious circle of ideology and short-term thinking. Both our major political parties believe that the free market can solve everything, even in areas where the free market has already made things far worse. Both our major parties cry poor on health, but think the sky’s the limit when it comes to nuclear-powered submarines.
Bulk Billing pays much less than it used to. Think about prices. Everything else has gone up over the last decade – houses prices, rents, food, you name it. But the Medicare rebate was frozen by Labor in 2013 as a temporary saving. The Coalition government that got in the next year kept the freeze in place until 2018. Meanwhile every other price went up.
So it’s not surprising that out-of-pocket costs for an average GP visit have increased almost 50 per cent in the last ten years.
Characteristically, Labor have made a partial attempt to improve things, putting an extra $3.5 billion into bulk billing. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not much after a decade of underfunding. It also appears to have been swallowed up by state payroll taxes.
So what’s the simple trick that will make you – and all of us – healthier? It’s called fully-funded socialised medicine. We can afford it – in fact, it would save the nation money by preventing more expensive diseases that are more likely to occur when people skimp on GP visits.
Governments would rather fund tax cuts and AUKUS, and they don’t want a fight with the private health industry. But the Communist Party of Australia will keep calling for it and working towards it.
