And I’m possibly the only person on the planet who cares. Sigh.
Several years ago, this humble Back Page scribe noticed something interesting – the much-maligned Medical Costs Finder website was not as useless as it appeared.
While it’s true that only a handful of doctors have ever used it for its main intended purpose and uploaded their fees for patients to compare and contrast, it also had a nifty way of displaying aggregated fee data beamed in directly from Medicare.
On the first day of each financial year, the site would be updated with new information about the average out-of-pocket costs and average bulk billing rate for a wide range of specialist and consultant item numbers.
When used correctly (read: when you’re willing to test the limits of your internet browser by opening up 20+ tabs) you can directly compare what doctors in different specialties are charging for a common item, such as a 110 (initial consultant physician professional attendance following a referral).
Remember two paragraphs ago, where we mentioned that this data gets updated on the first day of each financial year? The Medical Republic only worked this out by trial and error, but ever since the discovery we have rested soundly each new financial year’s eve in the knowledge that there would be a close-to-ready-made story available in the morning.
Last Wednesday, though, upon firing up the laptop and entering the Medical Costs Finder website, this most meek and modest author was perturbed to find that the site was still displaying cost data from the 2023-24 financial year.
Egads!
For the next 45 minutes, we attempted every method we could to see if it would update.
The web page was refreshed. Cookies were reset. Incognito tabs were opened. All to no avail.
In desperation, an email was sent to the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing alerting it to what was surely a catastrophic technology failure preventing the Medical Costs Finder from updating.
Astonished and shocked were we to receive the following reply:
“The Medical Costs Finder including current information on the website will be upgraded end 2026/early 2027 as part of the reforms of MCF that will increase transparency about individual specialist fees.”
The mystery of the non-update may now be solved, but one cannot help but wonder at the fact that – as one TMR reporter aptly put it – the Medical Costs Finder is now “even more useless than normal”.
Send your updated story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
