RISING fees brought about by the federal government’s freeze on the Medicare rebate has forced some Bendigo low income earners to forgo receiving much needed mental health care.
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At least one Bendigo mental health care provider has been forced to introduce a $40 gap fee to its consultations.
One of the owners of the practice said the rebate freeze had left the business in a precarious financial situation.
“Effectively, it means we’ve taken a pay cut every year because while our costs increase, we continue to bulk bill at the same rate,” she said.
“For us it has meant a significant pay cut of tens of thousands of dollars and it also means we have to see more clients.
“It’s had an effect on our quality of life because we’re working harder but it also means we’re not providing the same level of service to our clients because we’re seeing more people and it’s harder for them to get in.”
For some of the business’ clients, the $40 gap fee has proved too high of a cost to absorb.
“We’ve had several clients say ‘sorry, we can’t do that’ and they’ve pulled away,” she said.
The business has been able to extend hardship provisions to some of its lower income clients to see them through to the end of the year but others have been forced to withdraw from care.
“We feel we’ve let our clients down,” the business owner said.
“We had to put our own family first rather than the hundreds of families we see and that was a hard call to make and it was a call that took about a year of deliberation.”
The Medicare rebate freeze was first introduced by Labor in 2012. The federal government plans to keep it in place until the end of 2017.
Bendigo Community Health Services chief executive officer Kim Sykes said lower income earners are being hit hardest.
“If you have a chronic disease and a low income the proportion of your income that has to be spent on health care is significantly larger than those with higher incomes,” she said.
“Our concern is that lower income groups are already hurting and even seemingly small costs can have an extraordinary impact on these groups.
“Good health care needs to be accessible to all Australians.”