Senator’s attack on GPs is unfair – we don’t serve ourselves, we serve Medicare

Senator Hollie Hughes’ attack on GPs in outer metropolitan and regional areas last week where she described them as being “self-serving” ruffled a fair few doctors’ feathers if the AusDoc comments section is anything to go by.
Senator Hughes said she was “offended” that these GPs were complaining when they earned “hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and who are quite often the highest-paid people in country towns and yet expect the government to further incentivise them”.
She concluded that the shortage of GPs in non-metro areas was because future graduates saw general practice as a “second-rate career option”, with only 15% of medical students considering it as a preferred career choice.
This, she told a federal Senate committee hearing, had nothing to do with Federal Government but everything to do with the culture of medicine.