The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has been getting busy in the Medicare promotion kitchen, but not on assignment of benefit.
Adding to its existing ‘Medicare’s got the bill’ campaign, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has produced a slew of new promotional materials for GPs.
These include social media tiles with the phrase “bulk billing means Medicare pays the cost when you see a GP” or “more GPs are bulk billing”.
Doctors who prefer physical media need fear not, for Medicare has also provided a printable poster and even a postcard featuring the government’s “Medicare’s got the bill” slogan.
An updated fact sheet states that bulk billing “means you don’t pay anything when you see a GP, because Medicare covers the full cost of the service”, and that this could “save you and your family hundreds of dollars a year in out-of-pocket costs”.
Related
What GPs will not find among these patient-facing resources is information on the assignment of benefits for bulk billing changes.
It’s a somewhat curious omission given that the department has produced two fact sheets, one brochure and a poster to explain updates coming to assignment of benefit in the hospital context.
Similarly to the bulk billing changes, updated arrangements will allow patients to agree to have their Medicare benefit assigned to their private health insurer before a procedure and will support “digital workflows”.
In some cases, such as where a hospital or healthcare provider has a qualifying arrangement with a private health insurer to pay for medical services provided to patients covered by that insurer, the patient will be taken to have “implied” consent for their Medicare benefit to be assigned thus.
The DoHDA-produced poster directly encourages patients to “say yes to Medicare payment”.
Despite the similar name – “simplified billing” – and timing of these changes, these are only tangentially related to the bulk billing assignment of benefit changes.
There is still just one document in DoHDA’s recent publication history that relates to the bulk billing assignment of benefit changes; a lone Frequently Asked Questions document which has, in fact, been updated several times at this point.
The lack of government-led efforts to educate both patients and GPs about the bulk billing assignment of benefit changes means that, for the most part, this task has already been done by software vendors like Best Practice and professional associations like the RACGP and the Australian Association of Practice Management.
While a number of the more contentious aspects of Medicare bulk billing assignment of benefit changes were delayed at last minute, there are still significant changes coming in today.
This includes the introduction of enduring assignment of benefit.
