Oliver Frank wrote: > > I asked a couple of weeks ago whether any practices had decided to not > to bank Medicare 'pay doctor' cheques and instead wait for Medicare to > deposit the money into their bank accounts under the 90 day > unpresented cheque scheme. I am seriously thinking of implementing > this in my practice. It would save our staff from trying to work out > whether to try banking each Medicare 'pay doctor' cheque or not, > because we have deposited cheques that patients have brought in a few > weeks after receiving them and been charged an unpaid 'cheque fee' by > the bank when the bank found that Medicare had already cancelled the > cheque under the 90 day scheme. > > Another practice in our town does this. Everyone only pays the gap.90 days later the rebate is deposited into their account. This reverses the benefit for shorter payment times referred to earlier.
This is all so ridiculous. In this election year we should all be lobbying (including AMA and other representative organisations) for some common sense to this insurance quagmire. Gap payments should be allowed. The government has to get past this idealistic nonsense. The private insurance companies do this so very well with their on-line claiming for extras cover. We have been using it a bit lately for physio and optometry (teenage kids) and it is fantastic. Swipe your card and pay the gap. Simple. No need to involve the banks with deposits into the patient's account. Surely the extra work involved in EFTPOS claiming classifies as extra red tape. What happened to the findings of the Red Tape Task Force? All we are seeing is an alteration in the workload around authority prescriptions (which sounds like it could even be worse than now). Perhaps we need some industrial action. Should we refuse to use their on-line systems and mail in manual claiming again? If we could get united (I know -herding cats!) it would only need to be for a few days, and then repeat the performance later. Short term minor disruption to our cash flow, but major headache to Medicare. Rob Hosking Bacchus Marsh. _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
