The AMA says hospital doctors and health funds will face chaos on 1 July due to the government’s introduction at short notice of revisions to more than 900 MBS items.
Next month’s overhaul is the biggest change in Medicare for decades and will affect rebates for general surgery, orthopaedic surgery and cardiac procedures, including “significant” rebate cuts on certain items, said AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid.
While the AMA had agreed to engage with the MBS Reviews since 2015, Dr Khorshid said the problem was in the government’s lack of consultation and rushed inplementation.
“The problem that we’re calling out today is that government have only just released these new changes to the schedule in the last week or so, leaving only a few weeks for doctors, health funds and others to determine what their fees are and what the arrangements will be for the future,” he told the media on Sunday.
“Now, the changes to the schedule are quite significant, including very significant cuts to some rebates that patients may expect for their surgery as a result of rule changes within the MBS.
“But the bigger problem is the chaos that’s going to ensue because doctors can’t tell patients how much they can expect to receive back from their health fund because they simply don’t know.”
Dr Khorshid said patients should blame the government’s poor implementation, rather than health funds or doctors.
“It’s not the funds’ fault. They haven’t had a chance yet to develop their own fee schedules. It’s not the doctors’ fault because they’ve just got no information around which to have a conversation with their patients for surgeries that have already been booked post first of July.”
Doctors still did not have all the information needed to assess and change schedules and payment processes to reflect the July 1 changes, which involve changes to 594 orthopaedic surgery items, 150 general surgery items, and 188 cardiac surgery items, he said.
Dr Khorshid said patients needing hip arthroscopy, for example, could be “in limbo” as a result.
“Now, the MBS has really short-changed these patients for a number of years now, with changes a few years ago that affected doctors’ ability to provide this surgery. But they’ve been able to keep doing it through a creative use of the MBS schedule.