Katy Gallagher acknowledges Canberrans face the most expensive GP visits and lowest bulk-billing rates in the country. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the ACT hospital system recently including the pressure hospitals are under in meeting demand and the funding needed to support these services.
Whilst the hospital funding discussion is an important one and one which the Commonwealth Government has acknowledged with an increase of $50 million for ACT public hospitals flowing from July 1, it can’t be seen in isolation of the broader ACT health system pressures which affect access and affordability of health care here in the ACT.
These pressures are not unique to the ACT and have not appeared overnight.
Unfortunately, a decade of neglect to Medicare under the former Liberal/National Governments will take time to fix. In our first term we made progress to pull Medicare back from the brink and in this term, we will work to continue to strengthen the system with an $8 billion investment into Medicare.
For Canberrans the problems accessing health care are most obvious in the primary care system and despite efforts over the years to improve access and affordability, most notably through the very popular walk-in centre model, bulk-billed GP care in the ACT continues to underperform every other jurisdiction and out of pocket costs are often the highest in the country.
It’s for all these reasons that Federal Labor made local commitments specifically for the ACT which will start to roll out over the next 12 months.
The data for bulk-billing for the December 2024 quarter shows the ACT with the lowest bulk-billing rates in the country at 52.7 per cent compared to 77.4 per cent nationally.
When we look at the percentage of under 16-year-olds who were bulk-billed, only 66.9 per cent of presentations were bulk-billed against a national average of 89.8 per cent.
We don’t need the data to tell us (although the data confirms it) that out of pocket costs are higher here in the ACT than other States, except in a few instances where the Northern Territory and Tasmania pip us as the most expensive jurisdictions in certain categories, confirming that small jurisdictions face structural challenges around workforce and scale that is not unique to the ACT.
For the shortest GP consultation, the average out of pocket cost nationally is $30.03, in the ACT it is $33.91. For a standard consultation, the average out of pocket cost nationally is $42.46, in the ACT it is $46.83.
With all this data my colleagues Alicia Payne, Andrew Leigh, Dave Smith and I worked with the Health Minister Mark Butler on designing a $25 million response to help address problems in the primary care system that have not shifted for some time.
The package will fund the establishment of three new fully bulk-billing GP clinics across Canberra with a requirement to bring new doctors to Canberra to staff them. It will fund the ongoing operations of the Interchange Health Co-Op in Tuggeranong and it will provide an additional $10 million to increase the capacity for respite care beds in the ACT.
There will also be a new Urgent Care Centre established in Woden and new workforce incentives to attract more GPs to come and work in the ACT.
This is a comprehensive package to respond to the problems facing the ACT primary care system and will work in partnership with the massive $8.5 billion investment the Albanese Government is providing to strengthen Medicare and increase bulk-billing rates across Australia.
In some good news, we have already seen more bulk-billing in the ACT as a result of tripling the bulk-billing rate for concession card holders and under 16s with a 6.3 per cent increase or additional 44,874 consultations bulk-billed since November 2023.
This will increase further when tripling the bulk-billing rate for all consultations starts on 1 November this year.
We know there is a lot more to do to build the health system Canberrans deserve, including dealing with the exorbitant out of pocket expenses for specialist care in the ACT which is completely out of whack with the rest of the country.
My colleagues and I will continue to work on all these issues. We will monitor the implementation of our election commitments closely to ensure they are working as intended, which is to drive up bulk-billing rates and to give Canberrans more options to access a GP when and where they need it.
