As a sequel to his cowardly failure to condemn genocide Albo now supports the unilateral escalation against Iran
To be clear most professors are senior in their field and usually indicates research as well as teaching, I was in a cantankerous mood this morning. But regardless Medicare needs to take access to specialist treatment seriously.
Nationalise the mines and be done with it
Yes, obviously medicare would need to increase the rebate and private insurance fees would necessarily increase(as they would now be actually paying for care rather than acting a a gatekeeping mechanism)
Rebate for a short consult with a specialist is $81.55, a long consult is $236.65.
The title professor indicates that they hold a teaching position and says nothing about their clinical skill. Plenty of specialists take the piss and leverage the title to charge ridiculous fees.
In my experience as a GP a reasonable standard fee for a specialist is around $300 with $80 back from Medicare. So yes the Medicare rebate would need to increase substantially but I doubt more than we will save when AUKUS falls through. It is within the capacity of a government with the right priorities. Also increasing the availability of public specialists would be a good companion policy.
IMO there needs to be some regulation around this, a simple measure would be to tie Medicare payments to a pricing structure(eg. a specialist can only charge the Medicare rebate + 20%).
If a specialist wants to charge more then that's fine but the patient(or insurance) will have to pay the full cost
My bad, fixed