The college fears new legislation could lead to patient misinterpretation of billing data.
The royal GP college has pushed back on the government’s move to include some general practitioners in its pricing transparency bill, with a new submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee outlining its concern that the new legislation could mislead patients.
The submission itself came in response to the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026, which seeks to provide patients with regularly updated fee information.
While the RACGP supports transparency for patients as part of the principle of informed financial consent, it argued that the bill in its current form does not provide enough context.
“It is important to have transparency and sort of financial accountability, that goes without saying,” RACGP president Dr Michael Wright told The Medical Republic.
“There’s probably more value in being able to tell the difference between whether I’m paying $2000 or $10,000 out of pocket for a joint replacement.
“Whereas for GPs, the vast majority of the visits are delivered without fees and really you need to have more than just a cost figure.”
As part of the submission, the RACGP is pushing for the bill to include appropriate safeguards, consultation requirements and implementation constraints to warrant the college’s support.
The safeguards in question are based on college concerns over how GP-level fee data could create “misleading comparisons, influence billing behaviour and place additional pressure on the financial sustainability of general practice and access to care”.
“You’ve got to have some appropriate clinical and service context,” Dr Wright told TMR.
“It’d be a lot more beneficial having factors like consultation, time complexity, percentage of patients who have continuity of care, and they’d all be the important things you’d need to sort of interpret it, not just a cost figure.
“Providing information without context, I don’t think it’s helpful for our patients or for that [GP-patient] relationship.”
The RACGP argued that the initial reform that prompted the bill was focused on non-GP specialists, but the new legislation will enable the future publication of GP fees and billing data.
In response, the RACGP is arguing for an amendment to the bill in consultation with GPs to avoid potential misinterpretation and provide essential context to GP-billing data.
“I think there’s a danger that it could lead you to promote some misleading comparisons and be unhelpful rather than helpful,” Dr Wright told TMR.
“We’ve got to be really careful that we’re not just shifting a burden.
“We’ve already got enough care to be providing without another burden.
“We’re just going to make sure there isn’t sort of any obligation shifted onto general practice to do this sort of cost control work, which essentially comes about because Medicare rebates aren’t minor.”
