- The anaesthetist's fees are separate to the accounts from your hospital, pharmacy, and other doctors.
- Our fees are determined by surgical factors (such as the operation type, complexity, riskiness, after hours attendance and time taken) and patient factors (such your age, pre-existing medical status and intra-operative requirement for invasive monitoring).
- Please contact Carolyn, our accounts secretary, on 0439 903 247 to arrange payment or if you have questions about fees.
- Payment can be made by cheque, money order, bank transfer or credit card.
Medicare and health fund rebates may not fully cover the entire cost of your anaesthesia. This difference between our fees and your rebates is known as the out of pocket "gap." The size of the "gap" varies depending on your health fund because different funds will pay the doctor a different amount for the same procedure.
1. FULLY COVERED - no gap:
- All endoscopy or colonoscopy patients with medicare AND health insurance
- HBF & GMF patients
- DVA (Gold) patients
- Patients covered by Third Party Insurer (eg - workers compensation, motor vehicle compensation)
The only exception to this is if your procedure is on the "Restricted List" or if you are still serving the waiting period. Please contact your fund to check if your procedure will be fully covered.
2. NOT FULLY COVERED - some gap:
- Where possible, you will be provided with a quote but the actual gap may vary from this quote. The gap is dependent on the complexity of the anaesthesia and surgery, the duration of anaesthesia and surgery, and your health condition.
- For funds (such as Medibank, HIF, HCF, BUPA, MBF, GMF, CBHS, AHM, GMHBA) that allow a co-payment, patients do not have to pay the full amount because the majority of the fees are covered by the fund and medicare. You only need to pay the gap amount (around 1/3 of the total anaesthetic fee).
- For funds (such as NIB) that do not allow a patient co-payment, the fund rebate is much lower than from funds that allow patient co-payments. This results in a significantly higher gap even though the anaesthetic fee is the exactly the same for all our patients. Hence, the patients need to first pay the full anaesthetic fee and then a receipt will be provided for you to claim from your health fund and medicare.
3. NOT COVERED AT ALL - need to prepay fees:
- Uninsured patients - you will get a receipt to claim some rebate from medicare
- Overseas patients
- Patients who are still in the waiting period or who are having a procedure on their fund's "Restricted List"
- Patients having cosmetic surgery
