Radio interview with Minister Butler, 5AA Sunday Afternoons - 23 February 2025

JONNO EDWARDS, HOST: Well, a major announcement today, federally, with more bulk billing for Australians, with the biggest Medicare investment it seems like in history, with the aim to get more GPs staying in their role, rather than expanding to perhaps specialist roles to make more money. So many investments coming through. And the Minister for Health and Aged Care is Mark Butler. Minister, good afternoon and thank you time.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: My pleasure mate.
 
EDWARDS: Well, tell us what's this announcement going to do for everyday South Australians?
 
BUTLER: What it does for the first time is extend bulk billing support to all Australians. Up until now, it's only been available, the bulk billing funding, for pensioners, for kids under the age of 16, and for adults with a concession card.  That's worked really well. We tripled that bulk billing incentive the year before last, and that's turned bulk billing rates around for that group of Australians, so that now they're comfortably over 90 per cent. Meanwhile, bulk billing rates for other Australians has continued to slide. The College of GPs calls it “a free fall” because Medicare funding was frozen for much of the last decade. This investment extends that bulk billing support to all Australians for the first time. Also for the first time, we're paying an incentive payment to general practices who bulk bill all of their patients. It's a huge investment, that delivers on the core promise made 41 years ago in Medicare, which is every Australian should be able to access health care no matter what their means.
 
EDWARDS: I guess my question is do you think this is going to send more people to the GP? Is that the aim in perhaps improving the help of Australians by getting them to go to the doctor regularly, rather than putting it off like so many of us do?
 
BUTLER: That's right. I mean, at the end of the day, people don't go to the doctor for fun. They go when they need it. Too many Australians we hear are choosing not to go to the doctor because they can't afford it. Bulk billing was in free fall, out of pocket costs are soaring, and the number of Australians choosing not to go to the doctor because of cost is growing all the time. That means ultimately, they just end up often getting sicker and needing to be treated in another part of the healthcare system, like hospitals, which is actually more expensive. Yes, I want to see people go back to their GP that should be their first port of call. General practice is the backbone of a well-functioning healthcare system, and while bulk billing is in slide, we're not delivering that to all Australians.
 
EDWARDS: Talk to us about what you're expecting to hear from GPs. Do you think this will be welcomed by GPs, who are probably being overrun at the moment, and I guess this incentive to keep them in practice, to operate practice, how will this work for them?
 
BUTLER: It's a huge investment in general practice that follows on other big investments we've made since we came to government. When I came to government, I said I had no priority than rebuilding general practice after a decade of funding freezes. Already, this announcement has been welcomed by the Australian Medical Association, the AMA, by the College of General Practice, by a range of other groups as well, because they know it's going to make a huge difference.
 
At the same time, as I think you said in your intro, we also need to build the supply of general practitioners. We're also funding more University places for doctors. We're funding more training places for junior doctors to take up general practice, because we need to build that workforce as well, which, over recent years, has also been sliding.
 
EDWARDS: Why do you think it is that so many doctors choose to, I guess, move away from being a GP?
 
BUTLER: It used to be, not too many decades ago, that one in two medical graduates would choose general practice and the rest would go into other specialties, like a surgeon or an anaesthetist or something like that. That number of one in two has dropped to about one in seven, we need to build that back substantially. There are a range of reasons for that, one of them is financial. When you're training as a general practice, you'll generally earn quite a bit less than if you were training in a hospital setting. Today's funding seeks to close that income gap so that junior doctors choosing general practice won't have to make a financial sacrifice to do it. We're also providing them with parental leave entitlements over the course of that period. You get that in hospitals, often you don't get it if you're training in general practice. It's all about building the attractiveness of general practice again back for those junior doctors. We're already seeing the green shoots of recovery. This year, we've got more junior doctors training as GPs than we've ever had in Australia before. But I want to keep that curve rising the right way.
 
EDWARDS: Federal Health Minister Mark Butler, thank you so much for your time.
 
BUTLER: My pleasure.