this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
82 points (95.6% liked)
Australia
3520 readers
187 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Specialist fees (and nowadays a lot of GP fees for that matter) are not fully covered by the Medicare rebate. Typically you'll pay about $300 for an standard consultation appointment and get not quite half of that back.
Shoot, was it more comprehensive coverage before?
GP fees have increased steadily over the last decade but the previous conservative Liberal/National coalition government froze the Medicare rebate in 2014 to try to force more of a user-pays system into place, which led more and more practices to stop bulk billing (only charging the rebate amount, meaning no cost to the patient). The current Labor government (ostensibly centre-left but arguably more centre-right now) has increased the rebate, but it hasn't been enough to significantly reverse the trend yet. Specialist fees have always had an out of pocket cost in my adult lifetime (15-20 years).