Australia’s Medicare billing system is overly complicated, bureaucratic and not meeting the needs of a modern health service, potentially leaking billions of dollars. But claims this loss is mostly due to fraudulent billing practices by GPs are inaccurate.
In October, the ABC’s 7.30 program and the Nine newspapers raised concerns about an estimated A$8 billion in Medicare waste, caused by a mixture of doctors’ errors, over-servicing and outright fraud. The examples given, however, were almost exclusively intentional fraud, mainly in general practice. This promoted health minister Mark Butler to commission an independent review, led by Dr Pradeep Philip.
