Opinion: GP tax to hit those who can least afford it

Sunday Mail journalist Jill Poulsen had ready access to a GP when she feared for her newborn, but others aren’t so fortunate.

Sunday Mail journalist and new mother Jill Poulsen

When the anxiety that something terrible would happen to my newborn baby became so overwhelming that I was too afraid to close my eyes at night, it was my GP who I turned to.

I sat in the chair across from her and started to weep.

“I just don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to him,” I cried.

My son was only a few days old and I hadn’t slept a wink, not because he wasn’t sleeping, but because when night fell I was plagued by horrible thoughts of all the different ways he could be ripped away from me – my own personal nightmare, night after night.

I confided in the incredible midwives from the Birth Centre during a home visit about how I was feeling.

They suggested a trip to my GP, who saw me the very next day and treated me with her trademark compassion and high standard of medical care.

The treatment ensured that within only a couple of days, I was back to my old self and relishing the love bubble that some parents get to enjoy in those early days.

She’s usually booked out up to two weeks in advance, sometimes more, but she promised to make time for me even if all I needed was to talk.

I shudder to think for how much longer that anxiety would have gripped me had she not been there.

I guess I could have ended up battling my way through for weeks before the sleep deprivation and fear raged so hard that my loved ones would have been forced to take me to one of our hopelessly busy emergency departments.

But I am grateful to be one of the lucky ones.

I can afford to pay the out-of-pocket expenses required to access basic medical care and I don’t live in a regional town that doesn’t even have a GP servicing its local community any more.

I’m worried about what will happen to our GP clinics that are already struggling to stay open if the government does not act to offer an exemption for payroll tax on doctors working in clinics as contractors.

I’m worried for the new mums, the sick kids, the terminally ill, the elderly pensioners, families already struggling to make ends meet under the rising cost of living and our hospitals that are at breaking point.

We don’t need any more people showing up to hospitals when a GP could have easily intervened and helped before someone reached the point of needing hospitalisation.

They are the foundation of our health care system, and without them the whole thing might just come crashing down.