The health minister, Greg Hunt, has described large out-of-pocket medical expenses as a matter of “considerable community concern”, announcing an expert committee to look into the issue.
Hunt said a small number of specialist doctors were charging exorbitant fees and that some patients were unaware of the scale of these fees at the time of their referral to the specialist. For some patients, these fees were resulting in financial hardship, he said.
The CEO of the Consumers Health Forum, Leanne Wells, welcomed the committee’s inquiry, which will be chaired by the chief medical officer, Prof Brendan Murphy. The committee will investigate options to ensure consumers are better informed of fees before agreeing to treatment.
“The Consumers Health Forum has for some time been calling for the public listing of individual medical fees on an authoritative website so that consumers can quickly ascertain what fees they might face and compare them if possible with those of other specialists,” Wells said.
“The Senate committee into health insurance and out-of-pocket costs has recently also called for fees to be published on a searchable database which would also include details about the specialist’s experience and complication and error rates to enable consumers to weigh the relative skill of a given surgeon or doctor.
“That step towards greater transparency has the potential to make specialists, private insurance and the health sector generally, more responsive to community needs.”
The committee investigation into out-of-pocket costs is part of the package of reforms to private health insurance announced in October following a Senate inquiry into the private health insurance industry.
But the president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Michael Gannon, said patients experiencing unexpected or hidden fees was not common. He said it would be difficult to compare specialist fees and compel doctors to publish their fees given the range of services they provided.
“Eighty-six per cent of times people see a GP they know the fee and they know it’s zero dollars when they’re bulk-billed,” he told the ABC on Wednesday.
“If we look at the Medicare Benefits Schedule, for the average specialty there could easily be 300 different items. There’s between 15 and 20 different private health insurance companies and they have a bewildering array of products.”
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