Medicare refunds plan in waiting room Author: Julian Bajkowski Date: 14/03/2007 The Financial Review, Page: 50
A project to make $10 billion in Medicare refunds available electronically through the Eftpos network by the middle of 2007 has stalled after the government conceded the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the only major institution to have signed up.
Launched by Prime Minister John Howard in April 2006, the Medicare e-claiming scheme was hailed by the government as a showcase effort in the reduction of red tape facing citizens.
Medicare is regarded as a technological dinosaur because it still requires customers to manually submit paper claim forms to a network of 238 retail branches - a process estimated to cost between $3.50 and $10 a transaction.
The government has offered banks 23? a transaction to outsource the work, nearly five times the present Reserve Bank of Australia regulated interchange fee ceiling of 5? per inter-bank transaction.
Two banks that had previously expressed interest in becoming providers of electronic Medicare claiming are the National Australia Bank and Westpac. Transaction outsourcer First Data International, which owns the Cashcard brand and provides transaction processing services to Westpac and the Bank of Western Australia, has indicated it will not bid for the Medicare work.
Sources familiar with the negotiations yesterday described progress as slow and said it was unlikely a major bank other than the CBA would have an electronic Medicare claiming system ready to offer merchants by the middle of the year.
Medicare had previously sought to build its own financial transaction network, a proposal that was rejected by then human services minister Joe Hockey on the grounds it duplicated existing infrastructure that could be more cheaply supplied by banks.
The government sought to put a brave face on the lack of progress yesterday and said it expected to hold more talks with major institutions this week.
"E-claiming is being rolled out in the second half of 2007," a spokesman for Human Services Minister Chris Ellison said. "Discussions are continuing with other banks and we are optimistic they will join this initiative."
The spokesman said postal paper-based claims now took two weeks to process while email-based claims with supporting paperwork took up to eight days. Those preferring cash over the 17 million cheques issued annually must now visit a Medicare branch.
Ironically, the lack of tangible interest from major banks in the Medicare claiming scheme has boosted the confidence of smaller non-bank financial services players bidding for the work.
The chief executive of local financial services technology developer MoneySwitch, Jost Stollmann, said his company was more than happy to provide services to doctors where banks were not.
Mr Stollman said primary health providers were becoming more demanding of their point-of-sale services and now expected such services to be fully integrated with practice management software used by doctors - a service banks are yet to provide.
KEY POINTS * Postal paper-based Medicare claims now take two weeks to process. * Email-based claims with supporting paperwork take up to eight days. _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
