The Medicare “goose” will be “cooked” thanks to a small number of doctors ripping off the system unless they are made to change their ways, the head of the MBS Review Taskforce says.

Professor Bruce Robinson has revealed that the MBS review was his own idea, inspired by a conviction that clinicians needed to take responsibility for making it harder to game the system.

In a candid speech on Saturday, the former medical dean at the University of Sydney argued that the Medicare schedule was vague and out-of-date, allowing up to 10% of doctors to make inappropriate claims.

“The MBS not only had items on it that were redundant, but it had items on it where the descriptions were very poor,” he told the RACGP general practice owners conference in Sydney.