This appeared last week.
Will specialists consent to Greg Hunt revealing their fees?
The Medical Costs Finder site is being revamped
10th September 2021
On the scale of government-funded white elephants, the Medical Costs Finder website is certainly not the biggest beast in the health policy safari park.
It has not generated the taxpayer bills of My Health Record or disappeared into the National Medical Stockpile like Clive Palmer’s 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine — never to be seen again.
But it has failed to fulfil its basic promise: to let patients compare fees between different non-GP specialists offering the same procedure in the same local area.
When it launched in 2019, the site simply provided average out-of-pocket costs by post code for 62 hospital procedures.
It listed what percentage of patients paid no gap. And of those patients who did pay a gap, it showed what the median, top 10% and lowest 10% of fees were.
Mid-last year, it was updated to include some out-of-hospital procedures.
It allowed patients to search for the procedure but based on Australian Doctor's experience the website usually struggled with English words and generated the line 'Oops! It looks like your search returned no results this time'.
The one foolproof approach was inputting the relevant MBS item. But apart from the unfortunates who have to deal with the MBS for their livelihoods, it seemed a good way of torturing the average patient with pain they don't deserve.
So the Medical Costs Finder remained the specialist fee website with no specialists.
Next year, however, all this will apparently change.
Minister for Health Greg Hunt wants to revive the original promise.
Plan A is to give specialists a means of voluntarily submitting their fee list for common procedures.
Plan B, if not enough specialists volunteer the information, is some sort of mandate.
Despite the distractions to the health system currently, the plan rumbles on.
In June, Mr Hunt told The Courier-Mail the revamp to the website would also list how much each health fund contributed to each procedure.
It's not clear what non-GP specialists will make of the coming regime.
More here:
https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/will-specialists-consent-greg-hunt-revealing-their-fees
Let’s be clear, specialists in private practice are very unlikely to provide the fee information as they like the flexibility of being able to vary the fee depending on the patient and a range of other factors and they certainly don’t want to be locked into a fixed price.
For this reason, and a range of other factors, like a desire for professional independence, you can be sure the rate of take-up will be pretty low.
Specialists value their autonomy and are unlikely to play ball with an inquisitive Government web-site. It also needs to remembered that an independent private practitioner can basically charge what they like – there are no laws or regulations regarding what private service providers of any sort can charge their clients – think lawyers, accountants and so on!
I reckon, while well intentioned, this whole idea is DOA!
What do you think?
David.
3 comments:
How many patients shop around for the cheapest specialist?
Don't most take the advice of their GP? - who probably knows more about the capability of available specialists than any patient?
Is it likely that a patient who was worried about cost would trust a government website? Will the site rank cost against performance?
The Federal Department is desperate to show that it actually contributes something to the healthcare of Australians. It hasn't done a good job so far.
Well stated 5:31 PM. In my experience the only other driving factor was private health cover, which is a whole other debate.
Seems digital health has been relegated to small thinking these days.
Digital health is to healthcare as AI is to human intelligence. AI is hyped up algorithms. And we all know how good the government is at algorithms - remember RoboDebt?
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