![Assistant Minister for Rural and Regional Health Emma McBride and Cunningham MP Alison Byrnes spoke to doctors about changes to Medicare. Picture by Adam McLean. Assistant Minister for Rural and Regional Health Emma McBride and Cunningham MP Alison Byrnes spoke to doctors about changes to Medicare. Picture by Adam McLean.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/HcD9H4nNcktxiWcmkEEpQD/020ba18c-0551-4151-b89a-a5f2325395fd.jpg/r0_642_6280_4187_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Illawarra GPs say changes to Medicare will allow them to keep providing free care to their most vulnerable patients, but that it's too early to tell if appointments will get cheaper - or easier to find - for others.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Assistant Minister for Rural and Regional Health Emma McBride visited King Street Medical on Monday to talk to doctors about the federal government's $3.5 billion budget package, which will triple the financial reward for doctors who don't charge gap fees for certain patients.
With most of Wollongong and Shellharbour classified as metropolitan, GPs will receive $14 more as a bonus (with the incentive going up from $6.60 to $20.65) if they bulk-bill children, concession-card holders and pensioners from November.
One of the GPs at the medical centre, Dr Katherine Michelmore, welcomed these changes but said they did not go far enough to relieve the pressures on the health system.
"For the first time in a long time, general practice has something to feel pretty optimistic about," she said.
"But it's the first step and there's a lot more that we're going to need to ensure continuity of care and chronic disease management for general practice."
"There's still a shortage of doctors and I'm looking to this government to hopefully continue working on that."
A recent survey found, in the Cunningham electorate where the Warrawong medical centre is located, only 9.1 per cent of GP clinics offered bulk-billing to general patients.
The electorate was ranked seventh worst in NSW on this measure, and was one of just 25 electorates across Australia where the rate was below 10 per cent.
For those who could no longer access bulk-billed appointments, residents were paying an average of $37.96 in gap fees for a standard medical appointment.
After last week's budget measures were announced, Health Minister Mark Butler said he hoped doctors would pass on savings from the new incentives to other patients through lower gap fees.
Dr Michelmore said the raising of bulk billing incentives would help make practices like hers more viable into the future, but that it was hard to tell whether the benefits would flow to other patients.
"The raise to the bulk billing incentive is definitely welcome, but it's obviously restricted to certain groups, so there are some people who are going to be feeling like it's not going to improve their access," she said.
"We're talking about these very positive measures, but they don't actually come into place until November, and many practices across Australia are still having to manage with the current rates at the moment.
"So I think perhaps extrapolating as to how it's going to affect other billing is perhaps a little premature."
King Street Medical partner Dr Sanjay Bhargava said his practice had not stopped bulk-billing children and concession card holders despite rising costs for GPS, but that the changes to the incentives would allow his patients to feel more confident that they could continue to access free medical care.
"They knew we had kept up the bulk-billing, but they knew that most doctors were [stopping] and they could feel that we were under the pump and may have had to change any time," he said.
"We can keep going with bulk-billing now with confidence with no negative to the business - our running costs will be more sustainable."
Minister McBride said the incentive increases were designed to encourage more practices to bulk bill.
"We've seen under the former government, a dramatic drop bulk billing right across Australia, leaving some of the most vulnerable people unable to access care and ending up in the emergency departments of our already overstretched hospital system," she said.
"We know that practices were sometimes forced to cross subsidize by increasing the co-payment to other people because they didn't have enough through a bulk billing incentive, so by increasing the bulk billing incentive, children under 16 aged pensioners and other healthcare card holders are much more likely to be bulk billed."
Cunningham MP Alison Byrnes said the budget measures provided "a big relief" to local medical practices, and believed they would allow more people to see a doctor.
"Certainly being able to get an appointment here in the Illawarra has been really problematic and that is across the country and it's something that we're very conscious of," she said.
"This investment in tripling the bulk billing rate will allow particularly our most vulnerable people to get in and be able to see a doctor."