REBATES A DECADE BEHIND WHERE THEY SHOULD BE

continued from page 3 and many are making the difficult but necessary decision to stop bulk billing some or all of their patients and move to a private or mixed billing model,” Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Dr Nicole Higgins said.

“This follows many years of under-investment in general practice care including the six year-long Medicare rebate freeze.”

Optometry was first included on the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) in 1975. But since 1997, adjustments to the optometric MBS have continued to significantly lag beshind CPI, Optometry Australia said in June 2022 when indexation was increased by a “modest”

1.6%.

This came after a freeze in indexation for optometry between 2013 and 2019, plus a 5% cut to MBS rebates introduced by the government in 2015, which OA says has resulted in Medicare rebates in real terms being a decade behind where they should be today.

Cappuccio said the lengthy freeze on indexation of Medicare items, and inadequate indexation that isn’t aligned to increasing costs to provide healthcare, mean that many optometry Medicare items are insufficient to address the true costs of providing quality optometric care.

“We continue to advocate for fairer indexation. We also encourage and support practices to charge fair fees that cover the true cost of providing such care – and have extensive resources online to assist members in making this transition,” she said.

In the latest quarter, there were 2.6 million optometry services provided, which is the fifth highest number since records began in 2009-10.

The figure is considerably higher compared to 1.9 million optometry services provided in the corresponding 2021-22 quarter (when COVID limited public access to optometry), and the 2.3 million services provided in the 2018-19 September quarter (pre pandemic).