So the question for me is, will this effectively become a walk in bulk bill clinic? Because a lot of other ones have gone to mixed and private billing.
The state governments implication here is that hospital wait times are largely due to people incorrectly using the ED as a free GP.
Whilst there is an ED missuse problem, the story is misleading.
The reason the EDs are overflowing is due to a lack of beds, which is due to a lack of staffing. They have to have a certain ratio of staff to beds (patients in beds). The ED already can and will send people home if they turn up with a runny nose.
So how the hell is opening these new bulk clinics going to actually address the issue?
As for the people who are turning up with the aforementioned runny nose because they can’t afford the copay at their local GP?
Opening new bulk clinics staffed with med students as poorly paid indentured servants is not going to “solve” that.
Someone who can’t afford a copay isn’t going to commute across town to the bulk clinic to still make a (smaller) copay.ED waiting times (and the corresponding ambulance ramping) are a policy failure as hospital administrators are forced to cut costs.
They need more budget flexibility.
Centralised mega slave shop walk in clinics are also not the solution to GP’s “overcharging”, the unpalatable solution is to raise the medicare payout in line with inflation.
