First Year Of Medicare Data Shows Increase To Bulk Billing

Medicare billing data shows the Albanese Government's record investment to strengthen Medicare has revived bulk billing and created an additional 103,000 bulk billed visits to the GP every week, on average, or 5.4 million additional bulk billed visits since November last year.

2.2 million of the additional bulk billed visits were in rural and regional areas.

On 1 November 2023, the Government made the largest investment in bulk billing in Medicare history, targeted to families with children under 16, pensioners and concession card holders.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) called the investment a "game changer" and for the past 12 months, GPs said it gave them the confidence to bulk bill more often, after a decade of cuts and neglect to Medicare.

In a survey of thousands of doctors by the RACGP last month, more doctors now say they are bulk billing more patients, more often.

Today the Government released Medicare billing data for the first year since the historic investment took effect, which confirms the freefall in bulk billing it inherited has been arrested and turned around.

Families with children under 16, pensioners and concession card holders are now bulk billed much more often: 90.0 per cent of GP visits with children under 16 were bulk billed in the past year.

These 11 million Australians see their GP most often: they make up 40 per cent of patients, yet account for 60 per cent of GP visits, on average.

Nationally, 77.3 per cent of all GP visits were bulk billed in October 2024, an increase of 1.7 percentage points on the same month last year, before the investment took effect.

Every state and territory now has more bulk billing, with the largest rise in some states which have historically struggled with lower rates of bulk billing.

The number of Australians visiting their GP has also increased in the past 12 months, with a 1.2 percentage point increase in the number of GP visits overall.

The historic investment in bulk billing builds on other ways the Albanese Government is strengthening Medicare to make health care more available and affordable:

• Made the largest boost to Medicare rebates in decades, increasing rebates by more in two years than the former government did in nine years.
• Funding and opening 87 Medicare Urgent Care Clinics, so Australians can walk in and get bulk billed urgent care, seven days a week, open early to late, without waiting hours in a busy hospital emergency department.
• Added more than 17,000 new doctors to the health system in two years, delivering the most new doctors in more than a decade.
• Boosted the number of doctors training to become GPs by almost 25%, fully funding the training of 4,800 new GPs between 2023 and 2025.
• Made medicines cheaper, saving Australians $1 billion by cutting the cost of medicines, lowering the Safety Net threshold and 60-day prescriptions.

Quotes attributable to Minister Butler:

Labor introduced Medicare 40 years ago and we have defended and strengthened it ever since.

If we're going to strengthen Medicare after a decade of cuts and neglect, we need more doctors and we need more bulk billing.

Although we're not out of the woods yet and there is a lot of work still to do, we are seeing things turn around in those areas that we need.

We've got more doctors, we've got more bulk billing, and we've got Urgent Care Clinics that have already seen more than 850,000 patients, all fully bulk billed.