On the scale of government-funded white elephants, the Medical Costs Finder website is certainly not the biggest beast in the health policy safari park.  

It has not generated the taxpayer bills of My Health Record or disappeared into the National Medical Stockpile like Clive Palmer’s 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine — never to be seen again.

But it has failed to fulfil its basic promise: to let patients compare fees between different non-GP specialists offering the same procedure in the same local area.  

When it launched in 2019, the site simply provided average out-of-pocket costs by post code for 62 hospital procedures.