The Australian Medical Association (AMA) is expected to call for the government to stop its attacks on Medicare when it meets with new Health Minister Sussan Ley.
AMA president Professor Brian Owler was expected to meet with Ms Ley tomorrow to thrash out what was next for the health budget after the $20 rebate cuts for short visits were scrapped.
Dr Bastian Seidel from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners said GPs were concerned the Government was still planning to reduce the overall rebate to doctors by $5 and freeze indexation on Medicare rebates.
“So nothing has changed in that respect at all,” he said.
“What we are calling for, for a start, is a complete moratorium to any Medicare changes that can affect general practice.”
Dr Seidel said the Government had been unfairly targeting GPs and it should take an evidence-based look at spending.
“The Government spend on general practice services over the past 10 years has not changed at all,” he said.
“Whereas the Government spend on hospital care has quadrupled over the past 10 years and it doesn’t even take into the account the spend by state governments on hospital care.”
The AMA is expected to tell the Government there should be no cuts to health at all, but other groups are advocating for change in practices and hospitals.
The Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association is pushing to bring a US program called ‘Choosing Wisely’ to Australia.
The program has saved at least $5 billion in the United States and based on those figures, could save hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia.
The program identifies a range of common tests, treatments and procedures that do not provide obvious benefit or could be doing potential harm.
It asks doctors — in both hospitals and GP clinics — to reconsider ordering tests and scans that are sometimes unnecessary or when the treatment is the same regardless.
Suggestions include avoiding prescribing antibiotics for ear infections, which are often caused by viruses, or to order fewer blood tests in certain cases and to question prescribing cholesterol drugs to patients over age 75.
Hospitals Association executive director Andrew McAuliffe said they were working with doctors’ groups to bring the program to Australia, with an announcement expected later this year.
“The amount we’re spending on health at the moment isn’t really the issue, the challenge is the expansion over the coming years,” he said.
“The benefit of this approach is patients aren’t being subjected to unnecessary tests or investigations and they’re getting the services that are going to be providing the best outcome for them.
“It also means the resources that would otherwise be used on these patients are being redirected to those that need them the most.”
Long debate about health care savings
There has been much debate about how to save the health system money since the Government first mooted the co-payment last year.
In May the ABC revealed concerns that money was being wasted when patients with ongoing conditions were forced to return to their GPs annually for fresh specialist referrals so specialists could bill at a higher rate.
In 2012-13, specialists charged Medicare more than $1.5 billion for initial and subsequent visits.
It came after the ABC revealed Medicare was being defrauded of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
In April academics found the Government was wasting up to $120 million each year by letting doctors prescribe expensive combination medications when the drugs were cheaper as individual tablets.
There was also concern that imaging companies were using Medicare billing rules to bill patients, and the Government, more, and companies like Primary Health Care and other individual doctors over-servicing.
Academic Adam Elshaug has also identified 156 potentially ineffective and or unsafe services that are still paid for by Medicare.