Soaring doctor fees are a pain, but medics have another problem

The Age

16-06-2025

If you have a history of medical mayhem in your family, specialists are part of your life from early on. Sure, you might feel fine.
But my darling GPs have a different vibe. Feeling fine means nothing to them. So it is, with still a good six months to go in 2025, that I've nearly reached my safety net. Probably by this weekend, I'll be there. The Medicare safety nets come in when you incur a certain amount of out-of-pocket costs for out-of-pocket medical services. There's a scheduled fee. Then there is what we're really charged.
This week, the Grattan Institute released a report which revealed, kind of, the true cost of visiting a specialist in this country. It says 40 per cent of Australians saw a specialist in 2023-2024, and, with government, we spent nearly $9 billion in 2021-2022. More than one in five Australians who saw a specialist in 2023 was charged an extreme fee at least once. Grattan tells us one in 10 Australians who saw a psychiatrist ended up paying $400 in out-of-pocket costs for their initial consultation alone.
Grattan has a bunch of excellent recommendations. My favourite would be to strip Medicare rebates from specialists charging excessive fees. And then set the competition watchdog on specialist costs. Perfect.
But money is not the only problem. It's the emotional cost, the cognitive load. Decades back, we spent time concentrating on the way doctors dealt with patients. Universities started to interview students based on their interpersonal skills – and choosing them on that basis, as well as stuff they could study for.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency received more than 11,000 complaints about medical practitioners last year – well up from the year before. About one in six of those complaints is about communication. Whatever universities and specialist colleges are teaching their students about communication, it is not enough.
Five out of six in the list of top earners from the Australian Taxation Office are doctors of one kind or another. I'm sure they're happy. I wouldn't mind paying their gaps if I also thought I was getting good service. Clear, open communication. Warm hearts, warm hands. Medical receptionists who are not so overloaded they can't do their jobs properly. (A special shout-out to Anna. You are a gem and so is your boss.)
A quick but seriously anecdotal and eavesdroppy survey of the people who shared a waiting room with me last week – people going to the medical receptionist every 20 minutes or so to ask how much longer they would have to wait. My own experience at this practice? Five hours of delay. 'Sorry, the doctor is very busy.' So are the rest of us.