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Australia’s GPs want the federal government to butt out of Medicare funding, saying decisions about rebates and prices should be delegated to an independent body to avoid the politicisation of healthcare.
The call from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners would dampen future political fights over Medicare, ruling out such initiatives as the $8.5 billion boost to Medicare that became the centrepiece of Labor’s 2025 re-election campaign as well as previous government policies to freeze Medicare rebates.
Data from the office of Health Minister Mark Butler shows that the federal government’s Medicare investment is turning around GP bulk-billing rates: since November, when the Albanese government began paying doctors incentives not to charge patients out-of-pocket fees, 1300 extra clinics have become fully bulk-billing.
For general adult patients targeted by the measure, bulk-billing rates have risen 7 percentage points in that time – the largest quarterly rise on record. They are up 6.4 points in NSW and 9.2 points in Victoria. The national bulk-billing rate for all patients sits at 81.4 per cent, up 4.3 points in the year since the promise was first made.
