Medicare rebates being denied
Medicare Rebates are Being Denied!
I discovered that Medicare rules have changed so that they can deny giving rebates if a person has a phone consultation and has not seen their doctor at that practice in the past 12 months. The levy against your income is a forced contribution to a public insurance fund that will pay a relevant fee for each and every doctor’s visit; yet the government chose to change these rules without informing the “insured persons” and that seems to be a very interesting legal question as to the central question: “Can an Insurer change the terms of the agrement witout informing the insured person?” In most cases the anwer is no! Then there becomes an issue as to whether Medicare is or is not an insurance company under the meaning of the relevant acts related to insurance companies. While this has not been tested at law, it would seem that a business of the same name offers insurance to cover private health expenses. Having said this the question is the separation sufficient to prevent the insurance regulations to apply to Medicare? Also is their special regulations that exclude the government backed Insurance company from the general rules that apply to insurance companies. Some of these rules protect the customer from changes that an insurance company may make that would have negative impact on the customer, it is only reasonable that a government insurer be managed by the same rules.
This problem was highlighted when a scheduled doctor’s appointment had a complication due to the illness of the doctor, so that a planned visit to the doctor’s office was altered to be a phone consultation if it could not be postponed. As the apointment was to get a script for important medication that had run out and it was not medically wise to delay the script; it was at this point that the rule in regard to phone consultation was disclosed. The time frame outside the the 12 month rule was just 14 days and this was caused by the fact that a respiritary infection consultation about 7 months before prevented a face-to-face meeting due to new rules since the covid19 practice preventing persons with a respiritary infection entering a medical practice. A consequence of an ill thought out policy changes made on the run during a respiritary problem named covid19 which saw panic responses that were most unwise considering that a large variety of respiritary infections have been treated by doctors in their offices for well over 100 years without significant transmission to doctors, eceptionists and others visiting the sams doctor’s office.