The federal government’s plan to publish all specialists’ fees on the Medical Costs Finder website is likely to backfire by pushing up prices and leaving doctors with no ability to correct mistakes, peak medical bodies are arguing.
Introduced in February, Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026, empowers the government to publish specialist fees and out-of-pocket costs on the revamped site, using Medicare and private health fund data. The government pursued the legislation after only 88 doctors published fees on the site under the previous voluntary scheme.
Explanatory materials for the bill said the federal health department is “developing an analytical approach for the derivation of a single fee figure that can be published for a medical practitioner’s provision of a service for a given financial year”.
But this could actually increase costs, according to the Council of Presidents of Medical Colleges, which argued in a submission that published figures may act as an informal coordinating mechanism, discouraging competitive discounting.
This could “shift all providers toward a mid-range ‘acceptable’ price”, the council said.
The AMA said a single figure also failed to reflect how specialists billed in the real world.
“Many private specialists provide discounts to some patients on account of their age (e.g. children) or financial circumstances, but not to others, so an average fee may be misleading,” it said.
It also wasn’t clear whether single fee figures would be broken down by insurer as well as by hospital making it impossible for patients to tell whether out-of-pocket costs were driven by the doctor or the health fund, the AMA said.
“Given the concerns raised the AMA believes the department must establish robust governance arrangements that include the medical profession and other affected groups like private hospitals before going ahead with its proposals under this legislation,” it argued.
The RACP added that fees varied substantially by location, patient complexity, non-face-to-face time and clinical context, meaning a single annual figure could create a false impression that some specialists were poor value when they were simply treating more complex patients.
No right of appeal
Doctor groups also raised alarm about the absence of any independent complaints process. Under the bill as drafted, practitioners who believe incorrect fee information had been published about them were limited to an internal review by a ministerial delegate, or judicial review, submissions said.
The AMA called this “a fundamental flaw”, while the RACP said practitioners should be notified before publication and given adequate time to review their data.
The Senate standing committee on community affairs is due to report on the legislation on 15 April.