If you’ve visited a specialist recently, you may have felt the hit to your hip pocket. Patients are paying hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars out of pocket for healthcare as some doctors charge not just double, but triple, the Medicare rebate.
While GPs face pressure to bulk bill, there is no similar conversation about non-GP specialists, despite the fact they are also trained in the public system and remunerated through Medicare, experts told Guardian Australia when we recently wrote about this issue.
The effectiveness of the government’s much-derided Medical Costs Finder website is limited by the fact thatonly 86 specialists – out of 11,000 registered to practise – choose to voluntarily display their fee information. But even if there was more transparency around costs, there is no policy in place that would actually lower these fees.
Non-profit Patients Australia says part of the problem is that specialist doctors are increasingly adding a “booking fee” or an “administration fee” to the patient’s bill. This practice, known as split billing, not only raises the price but also means the extra cost is invisible to the government and private insurers.
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