LABOR is under intense pressure to reverse a freeze on the Medicare bulk billing rebate that would cost nearly $1 billion.
But as Opposition Leader Bill Shorten ramped up his attack over the surprise and unpopular Budget move, the Turnbull Government called on him to provide an alternative.
A two-year extension of the $37 frozen rate from 2018 to 2020 to save $925 million has seen GPs launch their own campaign by issuing prescriptions with warning messages to patients that they will pay more as a result in a co-payment by stealth.
But on Sunday Mr Shorten refused to give a watertight guarantee he would reverse the decision and instead foreshadowed his own changes.
“We will have a lot more to say on this very issue,” he said.
“We won’t be finalising our Medicare rebate policy today but I cannot be any clearer that GPs are the frontline of our medical system.
“Where you start telling GPs that they basically will not get compensated at all in Medicare for the rising costs of healthcare in this county, you are creating a disaster and you are undermining Medicare.”
But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pointed out Labor had first frozen the payment in 2013 and said that the rate of bulk billing had actually increased in recent years.
“We need to control the way we spend the health dollar within the limited means we have to enable us to have the funding to put new drugs on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme to extend new technologies,” he said.
Health Minister Sussan Ley called on Mr Shorten to stop complaining and put forward his plan.
“The national accounts put health spending under stress in the same way they do all other areas of expenditure,” she said.
“But we haven’t heard from Bill Shorten about what he wants to do in health policy.
“I don’t think he has actually written it because he keeps saying it’s coming, it’s coming. Not one single idea in health.”
Meanwhile, Mr Shorten was stopped by a woman unhappy about his asylum seeker policies while campaigning in the ALP-held, northern NSW seat of Richmond in yet another day of disunity on the issue.
Brisbane woman and Labor voter Patricia Rowan bailed up Mr Shorten to tell him she wanted asylum seekers processed in Australia but conceded she would vote for him anyway.