What is MyMedicare and why was it introduced?

MyMedicare is a voluntary patient registration system that links patients to a regular GP practice. The intent is to reward continuity of care: practices receive enhanced Medicare funding when enrolled patients access services there. The system was designed to improve longitudinal care relationships for people with chronic conditions, giving GP practices financial recognition for the ongoing relationships that produce the best outcomes. The Senate criticism is not about the intent — it is about what happens when patients are mobile, unstable in housing or location, or accessing multiple clinics, which is precisely the situation of many patients with the highest clinical complexity.

Does MyMedicare affect me if I have a regular GP?

For most patients with a stable relationship with one GP practice, MyMedicare is largely invisible and may improve access to enhanced services including longer appointments and chronic disease management plans. The friction surfaces at the margins: if you see more than one practice, move between locations, or access urgent care clinics alongside your regular GP, you may encounter barriers to having Medicare items claimed correctly. The Senate testimony confirms these margins are where the most vulnerable patients sit.

MyMedicare is working against the patients it should help most

What just happened

A Senate committee examining rural Medicare access and funding heard pointed testimony from Dr Sophia Couzos, representing the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council, describing MyMedicare as “an enormous hurdle and obstacle anathema to comprehensive general practice.”

The specific problem she named is operational, not rhetorical. When a patient enrolled at one clinic under MyMedicare visits another clinic — which happens routinely in rural, remote, and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service (ACCHO) settings where people move between locations — chronic disease plan funding claims at the second clinic are rejected. Staff are then required to manage re-registration rather than deliver care. Clinical time becomes administrative time in settings already running on thin margins.

A submission from the Western Queensland Primary Health Network put it plainly: “voluntary patient registration with MyMedicare remains unworkable where practices lack stable workforces.”

There is also a workforce feedback loop. The bulk billing incentive tied to MyMedicare is available to private practices but not equivalently to GPs in salaried ACCHO roles. The net result is a financial pull away from the settings that serve the most complex patient populations.

Both-and

What MyMedicare was designed to do

MyMedicare’s architecture is not arbitrary. The intent was to build what Australian general practice has long lacked: financial recognition for longitudinal care. Paying GPs per item of service, without any weighting for continuity, has historically incentivised throughput over relationship. A practice that sees the same complex patient repeatedly — managing their diabetes, their mental health, their medication list — invests significant clinical infrastructure that the Medicare Benefits Schedule has never adequately rewarded.

MyMedicare tries to change that by tethering enhanced funding to enrolment. That is a reasonable design principle, and for stable urban patients with a consistent GP, it may well improve care.

Where the theory breaks

The problem is in the assumptions. MyMedicare assumes that the patients who most need continuity are also the patients most stably attached to one clinic.

That assumption does not hold. The testimony Dr Couzos gave describes patients who are mobile, who live in communities served by multiple clinics, and whose life circumstances mean no single practice can be their anchor. These patients often carry the highest burden of chronic disease, the most complex medication regimes, and the greatest need for coordinated care. Under the current model, they are the ones the system penalises.

Senator Josh Dolega defended urgent care clinics during the hearing as meeting “very legitimate needs” in areas where regular GP access is impractical. Dr Couzos’s response was specific: text-message-based patient assignment, proposed as a solution, assumes literacy, stable phone access, and housing stability not universal in vulnerable populations. The fix assumes the same conditions the problem assumes away.

Dr Couzos’s framing question to the committee is worth sitting with: “What is the problem that is trying to be prevented?”

Medicare’s original design enabled universal access without registration complexity. The question the Senate inquiry is examining is whether layering a registration system on top of that creates more continuity or more friction. The testimony is clear: for the most mobile and vulnerable patients, it creates more friction.

A recurring pattern

This is not the first time a health reform designed to improve care for complex patients has created new barriers for exactly those patients. Policy designed around the modal patient — stable, urban, English-speaking, connected — creates compliance edges that cut against everyone outside that modal.

The Senate inquiry is the appropriate place for this debate. What matters now is whether the testimony produces a design adjustment, or joins a long queue of documented problems that get noted and deferred.

My two cents

The question Dr Couzos asked — what problem is this preventing? — is the right question to ask of any registration or credentialing layer placed on top of a universal healthcare system. The answer has to be specific and demonstrable, not assumed.

MyMedicare may still be the right direction for Australian general practice. Continuity matters, and financial structures that reward it are worth building. But the version currently operating has edges that are cutting people, in documented and specific ways. The Senate testimony is the mechanism for naming that out loud.

For any patient who has navigated the health system across multiple practices — moving suburbs, using urgent care alongside a regular GP, accessing specialist services that blur the enrolled-clinic boundary — this story describes something you may already know from the inside.

Verdict: yes — Senate testimony documents operational failures in MyMedicare’s design that are reducing care access for the most vulnerable patient populations, particularly in rural and remote settings.

Sources cited

Attard M. MyMedicare ‘anathema’ to comprehensive general practice, Senate committee hears. The Medical Republic, 30 July 2026. https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/mymedicare-anathema-to-comprehensive-primary-care-senate-committee-hears/