Medicare items for longer telephone consults, which will be scrapped next week, need to be retained because of the ongoing risk of COVID-19 transmission in GP practices, the RACGP says.

The $75.75 MBS item for telephone consults lasting longer than 20 minutes will vanish next Friday despite being claimed almost 100,000 times in April.

At the same time, the Federal Government is bringing in a new 30/20 rule, with any GP claiming 30 telephone items a day on more than 20 days in a 12-month period being automatically referred to the PSR for investigation.

On Monday, one GP warned the measures were a Medicare version of ‘bad faith’ private health insurance, with rules and bureaucratic complexity used deliberately to prevent patients accessing care.