PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: Many of you know how hard it can be to find a bulk billing GP, and while the rates of bulk billed appointments are increasing, right now still only 79% of appointments are bulk billed. But the Government says it's tripling of the bulk billing rate has helped to increase the rate more than 3% since it was introduced seven months ago. Mark Butler is the Health Minister and he joins us from our Parliament House studio. A bit of a shuffle with David Crowe, but you’re with us, welcome.
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Morning Patricia.
KARVELAS: At the end of 2021 the bulk billing was 88.4%, are you working to get bulk billing back to that rate?
BUTLER: The bulk billing rate that you just referred to, pulled together a whole range of things, and particularly during the COVID period you saw the bulk billing rate artificially inflated through COVID vaccinations and a range of other COVID related activity that had to be bulk billed. What we did when we came to Government is to separate out the thing that people are particularly focused on, which is visits to the GP, and started reporting on that very transparently, very regularly. Reporting on the different markets, so different states have very different bulk billing rates. New South Wales has parts of their community that have very high rates of bulk billing. Tasmania, on the other hand, has had much lower rates of bulk billing. We tried to shine a light on really what was happening, particularly in relation to visits to GPs. That's some of the data that I'm publishing today, which shows that since we tripled the bulk billing incentive for GP visits, which was a response to a direct request from the College of GPs, we have seen around 1.7 million additional free visits to the doctor in just 7 months.
KARVELAS: Statistics from your own department, though, released last month, show that between July last year and March this year, there was actually a 4% drop in the bulk billing rate and a 2.5% drop in the number of GP services. What does that tell you?
BUTLER: It confirms what I've been saying quite up front for some time, which is bulk billing was dropping when we came to Government. That's not really a surprise given that the former government, particularly Peter Dutton, froze the Medicare rebate for 6 years. When you freeze the income of GPs, you put real pressure on bulk billing. I’ve tried to be very upfront about that. There has also been a decline in GP visits, partly because it is hard to find a GP, we do have a supply problem there that I've also been very upfront about. But it also reflects the fact that there was an artificial inflation in the number of GP consults through COVID, very short consults, usually for vaccinations and such like, and you have seen a natural drop off in those. So, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but broadly I think I've been very up front that bulk billing was in decline. That's why we’ve pumped $3.5 billion in last year’s Budget into bulk billing incentives and we’re starting to see that work. We’re not going to fix this overnight, but we are starting to see that work. We're starting to see Urgent Care Clinics work, we’re starting to see cheaper medicines. That was the program we promised the Australian people to strengthen Medicare at the last election.
KARVELAS: You say you won't see it overnight, well, what is the time frame that you're working towards?
BUTLER: As I said, we've seen over the last 7 months, around 1.7 million additional visits to the doctor, bulk billed, completely free of charge. We are starting to see that bulk billing rate turn around. Most pleasingly, I think it's starting to turn around quite sharply in the markets I was most worried about.
Tasmania in the last 7 months has seen an 8% increase in bulk billing. They had the lowest rate of bulk billing of all of the states. The bulk of the additional free visits are in rural and regional Australia, where you really did see a big decline in bulk billing. It's a bit of a mixed picture across the country. You still have parts of Western and South Western Sydney that have bulk billing rates well over 95%, but you see other parts of the country where they're really quite low. Pulling it together, though, you're seeing more free visits to the doctor, you're seeing hundreds of thousands of free visits to Urgent Care Clinics, which is also taking pressure off our hospitals, and you're seeing millions of Australians benefit from cheaper medicines. That was the promise we made to the Australian people.
KARVELAS: A paper by the University of Melbourne shows it would cost, I think it's about like $950 million a year for all GP services to be bulk billed, would you consider that?
BUTLER: The focus we made in last year's Budget was pensioners, concession cardholders, and children under the age of 16. That has been the group that has traditionally been the focus of bulk billing incentives going back many years. It accounts for about 60% of GP business overall, but in some parts of the country considerably more than that. Tripling the bulk billing incentive was a very big increase to the income of general practice, particularly if they had large numbers of pensioners and concession card holders coming through their doors. For a metropolitan GP, it was an increase of about a third in the standard consult rate for bulk billing, and in regional Australia about 50%, that's a huge increase to their income, which is why I think you're starting to see a recovery in the bulk billing rate.
KARVELAS: I want to go to another issue if we can Minister. The NDIS this week, a Senate Estimates hearing has heard detailed accounts of how the system is being defrauded. We've heard at least 5%, and Bill Shorten says up to 10% of the money in the scheme isn't being used in the way it's meant to, so it's a pretty steep increase. What's going so wrong?
BUTLER: I heard David Crowe before because we're in the same room, say that this was a pretty startling piece of testimony, and I think it will be to the Australian people. I think the NDIS has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with disability. Remembering before the scheme was introduced it was incredibly hard for people living with disability, parents with kids with disability to get the services they need. It's been a terrific reform, but it's quite clear there's too much waste, and there's too many rorts, and too many dodgy providers. We need to get this scheme back on track. We're debating legislation today and probably through tonight in the parliament, as part of the arrangements that the Prime Minister struck with the premiers and chief ministers in December. We need to make changes to get this thing back under control, because I think the testimony that Australian people would have woken up to in their newspapers and on programmes like yours this morning will be a real shock to them because they'll know people who maybe aren't getting the support that they could get under the NDIS while they read stories like this. It's clearly something that we need to get back under control, and Bill Shorten is one of the architects of the scheme, is absolutely the right person to do that.
KARVELAS: There's also today going to be a speech delivered into the Press Club from the News Corp boss. I spoke to him earlier, he will say that essentially, we are paying the social and economic cost of the social media crisis for decades. He'll talk about suicide rates and the change he's calling for, which is greater safeguards. Do you think the kind of reforms that News Corporation is calling for are ones that are worthy of exploring?
BUTLER: I'm not really across exactly what reforms he'll be talking about today, but members of our Government have been talking about the deep impact, the really negative impact that social media is having on the lives of young Australians. I was only last week talking to a number of my colleagues from overseas, health ministers from other countries, who are grappling with exactly the same thing. This is having a huge impact on the mental health, the learning of behaviours of young Australians and young people right across the world. I think parents are really concerned about this, school communities are concerned about this and they want to see some action from their Government. Michelle Rowland, the Communications Minister, the Prime Minister have talked about this and we’re determined to take some action.
KARVELAS: Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
BUTLER: Thanks, Patricia.
Media event date:
Date published:
Media type:
Transcript
Audience:
General public
Minister: