Non-GP specialists decry Medicare ‘clickbait’

A group of 30 diverse Townsville doctors with roles ranging from cardiologist to neurologist have banded together to issue a strongly worded letter in support of general practice.
 
Writing to the Townsville Bulletin following the recent Medicare coverage in Nine Newspapers and the ABC, they said the blame for waste had been laid ‘broadly at GPs’ feet with unsubstantiated, non-evidenced based claims by a “Medicare expert”’.
 
‘The $8 billion [30%] claim has been debunked and is entirely baseless,’ they wrote.
 
Calling primary care ‘the backbone of our healthcare system’, the medical professions also described GPs as ‘the most indispensable healthcare professionals in our lives’ and made the case that the system has let general practice down.
 
‘From decades before through to and beyond COVID, general practitioners have been failed by systemic policy decisions and become the punching bag for mainstream media and social media posters who feel they know more,’ they wrote.
 
‘[The] reporting ignores past and present systematic accepted waste.
 
‘No context is provided to the complexity of the Medicare item numbers that dictate what can be claimed and when with the inherent compliance risk responsibility solely the practitioners.
 
‘Experiencing a day in a GP’s work would provide understanding and context before one publishes the next clickbait story.’
 
The doctors focused on the systemic problems of bulk billing, as well as pointing out the issues faced by many general practices during the pandemic – for example the contrasting approach to the supply of personal protective equipment to hospitals and general practices.
 
‘When was the last time you asked your hairdresser to throw in the foils, your cafe to give you coffee at cost, your tradie to throw in the materials, or your lawyer not to bill you? Never?’ the letter reads.
 
The doctors also raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of general practice, in particular highlighting how the popularity of choosing to become a GP has declined significantly over the past decade and a half.
 
‘If this is not corrected, the difficulties seeing a GP will only be worse and the viability of our health system will be jeopardised,’ they warned.
 
‘All issues currently in healthcare, ambulance ramping, increasing ED presentations, surgical wait lists, hospitalisation for chronic illness stabilisation are directly contributed to by [the] inability of people being able to access and benefit from high quality primary care.
 
‘We, non-GP specialists, without reservation support our primary care specialists and advocate for greater respect for this critical component of healthcare and necessary system reform including required funding to allow GP to once again flourish for the benefit of us all now and into the future.’
 
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