MEDICARE REBATE AND MEDICARE SCHEDULE FEE
Medicare Rebate
The Medicare rebate is 85 per cent of the Medicare Schedule Fee. When doctors bulk bill this is the percentage of the Schedule Fee that they receive. Patients also receive this proportion of the Schedule Fee when they pay their medical bills prior to the receipt of a Medicare Rebate. The fee the doctor charges for a patient may be much higher than the Schedule Fee and therefore much higher again than the Medicare Rebate. Why the government chooses to say a doctor’s service is worth the Schedule Fee; and then proceed to rebate 15 per cent less has never been adequately explained to either doctors or their patients.
Medicare Schedule Fee
The Medicare Schedule Fee is a value derived by public servants in Canberra. It is a unilateral determination calculated without consultation with either the public; or the medical profession. Because it is a determination made by government looking over its shoulder at fiscal policy the Schedule does not necessarily represent the real value of medical services it purports to reimburse.
Irrespective of the extent to which the Schedule Fee represents the market value of a doctor’s services, it has been used in conjunction with bulk billing to gain control of general practitioners incomes. In so far as he who pays the piper calls the tune the Federal Government now has defacto control of most general practitioner’s and some procedural specialist’s incomes; whilst the market place still controls their expenditure.
Institutionalized in this way there can be no end to conflict between the Federal Government and the medical profession. This state of affairs serves poorly the best interests of Australia’s sick and suffering. It is the thin edge of increased waiting times, rationing of services and arbitrary inroads into the nations health expenditure at the whim of party political purposes.
*96/131/5*
