Federal Election 2016: Shorten vows to end freeze on Medicare rebates

Bill Shorten has unveiled his plan to unfreeze the indexation of rebates paid to GPs under the Medicare Benefits Schedule.

Bill Shorten says the freeze amounted to a “GP tax,” but was forced on to the back foot after receiving questions about a previous Labor decision to introduce a temporary freeze on the indexation of the rebates.

Bill Shorten has unveiled his plan to unfreeze the indexation of rebates paid to GPs under the Medicare Benefits Schedule — a move he says will stop patients being hit with a $20 charge when they visit the doctor.

The move is the most expensive commitment made so far by Labor in the long election campaign, with the Opposition Leader making the announcement at a doctor’s surgery in the NSW central coast Liberal seat of Dobell alongside Labor candidate Emma McBride.

Mr Shorten says the freeze amounted to a “GP tax,” but was forced on to the back foot after receiving questions about a previous Labor decision to introduce a temporary freeze on the indexation of the rebates.

Attempting to draw election battlelines around health policy — seen as a traditional area of Labor strength — Mr Shorten said he would stand up to defend bulk billing as well as Medicare.

While Labor started the freeze when Tanya Plibersek was health minister to claw back $664 over four years, the Coalition continued the saving. The Labor commitment to overturn it has been costed by the parliamentary budget office at $12.2bn over the decade.

Mr Shorten today said Labor only intended the freeze to be temporary.

“Labor always budgeted to not continue the freeze beyond July 1 2014. That was a temporary freeze. It was a matter of the budget,” he said.

“But when the Liberal Party under Mr Turnbull freezed the GP rebates for six years, that’s more than a budget matter. That’s undermining bulk billing and Medicare ... There is a battle on in this country about the future of Medicare.”

Mr Shorten said that Australia only spent about 10 per cent of economic output on health, warning the freeze would lead Australia towards the US health system where he said about 17 per cent of economic output went towards health.

“I do not want people who are sick, on fixed income pensions ... to have to choose between to have to shop in that week ... or going to the doctor,” he said.

He warned that sick people would defer going to the doctor and end up clogging up emergency wards in the hospitals, which he said would impose a greater cost on the budget bottom line.