Health Issues, 2004, Number 79, pp. 19-24. 1 From A Fairer Medicare to Medicare Plus: What are the Implications for the Future of Bulk-billing and Medicare?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent passing by the Senate of the Commonwealth government’s Medicare Plus package, followed a year-long debate about the future of Medicare. During this period a Senate Select Committee on Medicare was established to examine the government’s first package, A Fairer Medicare, and then reconvened to consider its second package, Medicare Plus. This article examines both packages and explores the impact that Medicare Plus will have, if any, on the rate of bulk-billing and patient out-of-pocket costs for general practitioner services throughout Australia and asks whether ‘Medicare Plus’ will strengthen or undermine Medicare. The Decline in Bulk-billing by General Practitioners The decline in bulk-billing and rise in out-of-pocket costs for general practitioner services in recent years has led to a significant focus on health policy, and specifically Medicare. Bulk-billing rose from 74.2 % in 1992-93 to a peak of 80.6 % in 1996-97 (see figure 1) before falling to 66.5 % in December 2003 (Commonwealth Department of Health & Ageing, 2004a). During this same period, out-of-pocket costs for general practitioner services have risen from an average of $6.90 to $14.03 (Commonwealth Department of
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.112 | 0.035 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".