This article was originally published in July 2017.
Since assuming his new role in January this year, health minister Greg Hunt has been working to balance the Medicare budget while simultaneously receiving calls from organisations such as the Australian Medical Association to scrap the controversial freeze on the Medicare rebate indexation.
Medicare co-payments and freezing Medicare rebates have been the tools used by the government to attempt to balance the Medicare budget. Life Course Centre Fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Sydney Dr Stefanie Schurer, along with co-author Ms Rosemary Elkins, addressed the difficulties of using a freeze to achieve this in an article published in The Conversation.
The authors ask, ‘If many more GPs start charging a co-payment, how might it affect Australians with different health and income characteristics? This is one of the key questions we should ask when we think about the viability and fairness of a policy like the Medicare indexation freeze.’
As Schurer and Elkins point out, in any age group people in lower income groups have a higher rate of chronic illness compared to higher income groups. If GPs pass on cost from the rebate freeze, poorer sicker patients will be hardest hit.
Read the full article here.