The secret fee list your doctor doesn't want you to see
Doctors are charging patients up to 10 times more than the Medicare fees for hospital procedures, while others are charging secret gap fees, News Corp has reported.
As reported in the Herald Sun by Sue Dunleavy
IT’S the document doctors don’t want you to see.
The secret fee bible that recommends specialists charge up to three times more than the Medicare fee for thousands of hospital procedures can be revealed for the first time.
News Corp has obtained the Australian Medical Association’s “List of Services and Fees”, used by doctors to set their rates for more than 8700 common procedures.
And their greed is plain to see — some are charging 10 times more than what it recommends, contributing to the more than $1.6 billion a year in gap payments not covered by patients’ health fund or Medicare.
The peak doctors group has for years refused to make the fee list public and in doing so has made it impossible for patients to understand whether their doctor’s fees were reasonable.
Today we lift the lid on a massive overcharging scandal by showing that many doctors are charging even in excess of these higher AMA fees.
And we give consumers the power to find out if their doctor is overcharging via a new online tool that lets them compare the fees they have been quoted to those recommended by Medicare and the AMA.
For ACT residents, the recommended AMA and Medicare fees are the same as NSW, but gap fees may vary.
Read the full article and access the tool via the Herald Sun: 'The secret fee list your doctor doesn't want you to see', and in the Courier Mail, 'AMA list exposes overcharging doctors'.
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