Australia’s Medicare billing system is overly complicated, bureaucratic and not meeting the needs of a modern health service, potentially leaking billions of dollars.

But claims that this loss is mostly due to fraudulent billing practices by GPs are inaccurate.

In October, the ABC’s 7.30 program and the Nine newspapers raised concerns about an estimated $8 billion in Medicare waste, caused by a mixture of doctors’ errors, overservicing and outright fraud.

The examples given, however, were almost exclusively intentional fraud, mainly in general practice.