The sound of obstetricians crying poor in the wake of budget changes to the Medicare Safety Net is not eliciting much sympathy in many quarters.
Take this, from GP Dr Kerri Parnell, the editor of Australian Doctor, a magazine for GPs.
She writes in the latest issue: “Within a month of the Medicare Safety Net being introduced in 2004, I’d heard of several obstetricians who’d automatically jacked up their fees, some to $5,000 per delivery. Presumably they slept at night because the extra costs would come from government coffers, not their own patients’ pockets”.
I expect the sound of pathologists crying poor will attract just as much sympathy from large chunks of the health and medical sector.
But you’ve got to hand it to those pathologists. The Australian Association of Pathology Practices, which represents private providers, has done a very nice job in their press release of framing the cutbacks as an attack on patients. Mind you, the strategy hasn’t worked too well for the obstetricians so far.
