The AMA’s leadership is in urgent need of a reality check

The Australian Medical Association seems determined to prove the old adage that the best defence is a good offence.

The AMA and its federal president, Professor Steve Robson, have described a joint investigation into Medicare by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the ABC’s 7.30 as an “unjustified slur on the medical profession”, “rubbish”, “a fantasy” and “staggering in its inaccuracies and its nastiness”.

Robson and others have also sought to discredit or dismiss the whistleblowers who have sounded the alarm on the fraud, incorrect payments and errors robbing Medicare and, by extension, taxpayers of billions of dollars each year.

These blitzkrieg campaign tactics are eerily reminiscent of those deployed by the banking sector when reports of shocking conduct within the industry emerged between 2013 and 2017. The broken banking system was in large part exposed by Adele Ferguson, the Gold Walkley Award-winning journalist now leading the investigation into Medicare.

The AMA launched its assault before even viewing Monday night’s episode of 7.30, which contained revelations about rorting and overservicing that cannot be ignored. The Herald believes these case studies do not prove the trouble is confined to a tiny minority but actually point to a wider problem.

But that does not infer that the whole profession – or even a majority – is guilty of milking Medicare.

The AMA’s shrill and misleading public relations campaign has sought to discredit an estimate by Dr Margaret Faux, who has a PhD in Medicare claiming and compliance, that up to $8 billion a year is being lost from Medicare.

The AMA is trying to muddy the waters by arguing it is not possible to lose $8 billion through fraud, however, no such allegation has been made. The actual claim is that up to a third of Medicare’s annual budget, or about $8 billion, is being lost through a combination of rorting, overservicing and incorrect billing procedures.

A national discussion about the future of Medicare and the true scale of waste within its $28 billion annual budget is a good thing, and the Herald and its reporting are never above scrutiny.

However, neither is the AMA.