Date: 30/4/2026
Compere: Tony Moclair
| Tony Moclair | Ben Harris, Director of Policy at Private Healthcare Australia. Ben, good afternoon. |
| Ben Harris | Good afternoon. Tony, how are you? |
| Tony Moclair | Well, I’m interested in this because of the, let’s say, political disposition of this government. It’s very, very used to making scapegoats. In this case, is it easy to point the blame at specialists who are well healed when it’s the government, in fact, that controls most of the inputs into healthcare in Australia. Is this a little bit of deflection? Perhaps. |
| Ben Harris | Oh, look Tony. It’s easy to blame lots of people, and when I work for private health insurance, we get blamed all the time. Yeah, it is complex, but the Minister is on the money with this. He’s got a really important issue, and I just want to spend a little bit of time saying what he’s talking about. Now, when you go to a general practitioner and you’re referred to a specialist, you can actually go to any specialist, while you might get Doctor Blogs on the referral. You can go to any specialist you like in that area. So whether it’s a dermatologist, a psychiatrist, the surgeon, the radiologist |
| Tony Moclair | But sorry, sorry, Ben, but then the letter that you’re given by the GP is, is often addressed in person to the specialist. Thank you Doctor Blogs for seeing patient, Ben Harris, what do you do about that? |
| Ben Harris | You can take it to any specialist you like. |
| Tony Moclair | Okay |
| Ben Harris | And that’s really important, because every specialist in Australia is really well trained. They are good at what they do, so and cost is an issue, and the general practitioner doesn’t actually know how much that specialist is going to charge. And as you said in your introduction, and we’ve researched this, one in two people don’t know before attending what the cost is going to be.
Now private health insurance isn’t allowed to cover specialists out in the community. We are only allowed to cover specialists in hospital, and we know that doctors in hospitals have increased their out of pocket fees, the bits the patient pay themselves, by 22% over the last three years. That’s an average it’s actually gone up a lot more than that, but we’re seeing in the community stories of people with hundreds of dollars of out of pocket costs, and that’s stopping people getting health care at the moment. You can take your specialist letter, and you can ring around and hope you can find a specialist who won’t charge you as much, and we’ll see you in a timely manner. As you said, waiting times can be fairly extreme as well. Now transparency is really, really important here. What we know is there a whole heap of doctors who charge really high amounts, and doctors who are just as good, they’re all good specialists who charge a lot less. And you might need to wait more. You might not, but the government’s going to set up a website called medical cost finder. At the moment, you can go and look at medical cost finder and look at the average fees, but what they do, hopefully by the end of this year, is have every single doctor’s fees on there. It’s not acceptable for people not to know how much it’s going to cost. |
| Tony Moclair | Okay, that’s all well and good, but the government has a terrible track record these things often cost a colossal amount of taxpayers money and don’t work. I’m looking at the Kevin Rudd’s fuel price website, which crashed and burned. But look, that said, in principle, it’s a good idea. How have medical specialists, who are, you know, who are powerful? They’re well healed. They can lobby well. How have they reacted to a, the this idea of price regulation, which Mark Butler has floated and b, this idea of a website. |
| Ben Harris | On the website, they’ve basically ignored it. It’s been there for five years, and less than 100 doctors have put their fees up. So the Minister is going to make it compulsory. But this issue around what doctors can charge. They can pretty much charge whatever they like, and I’m really interested to see how or if the Minister is going to tackle that issue. But the issue that I’m most concerned about is patients deserve to know before attending what it’s going to cost, and it’s absolutely ridiculous but you don’t know,and that’s stopping people getting health care. It means people aren’t going to see the specialist. Nearly one in three people get a specialist referral have had got a specialist referral over the last three years and not gone. |
| Tony Moclair | You’ve mentioned two things here Ben, you don’t know what the cost is, but you know it’s going to be high, and you defer that because, because you don’t have the money, and so that just aggravates whatever health condition you might have. I want to put this to you in the article about this in the Guardian it said that stripping Medicare rebates from specialists who charge excessive fees was an area for consideration. Tell us about the impact of that and what that would mean in practice. |
| Ben Harris | Well, we have some people who charge who are real outliers. They charge so much more than everyone else. One of the ideas which was put up by the Grattan Institute is to stop those people getting Medicare. I’m not a huge fan of that, I think everyone should get their Medicare rebate. But it is really, really important that people know that if you’re charging a high price, you are not getting a better service. Every doctor who is a specialist, who’s part of a specialist College, is really well trained, so at the moment, you need to get on the phone and shop around, and that’s not great. |
| Tony Moclair | Great advice. |
| Ben Harris | Cost find is really going to be really important to this |
| Tony Moclair | Shop around and beware. Ben Harris, Director of Policy at private health care Australia, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. |
| Ben Harris | Thanks. |
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