Rising costs are to blame

More Australian GPs are moving away from 100% bulk billing as the costs of running a practice continue to outstrip the Medicare rebates offered by the government.

A survey of 477 GPs conducted by Healthed on 2 August revealed that 22% of those surveyed had changed their billing model recently.

When the same survey question was put to over a thousand GPs in July last year, only 10% had recently changed their billing model, although 7% said their practice was considering switching.