Billions of dollars are being rorted from Medicare each year by medical practitioners charging for services that are unnecessary or didn’t even happen.

A joint investigation from The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC has found an online course teaches doctors how to maximise returns, promoting the practice as legal and ethical.

With only a patient’s name, date of birth and Medicare number, a health practitioner can bulk bill anything and it’s often undetectable.

The leakage is estimated to represent nearly 30 per cent of Medicare’s annual budget, or around $8 billion a year.

Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten told Today the system needs to be looked at closely.

“It’s a resource question,” he said. “If you don’t put enough effort into payments integrity guardianship, then you will get rorts.”

The Australian Medical Association issued a statement, saying it would impact only a small number of doctors and slamming it as an “unjustified slur” on the profession.

The association says the figures were “grossly inflated”.

Medicare expert Dr Margaret Faux, who has conducted research into the area, rejected the AMA’s conclusion.

“No surprises there, the AMA is a lobby group, so you would expect this response from them,” she told Sofie Formica.

She said there was no evidence that it was only a small group of doctors defrauding the system, like the AMA claims.

It has been a systemic problem since the beginning of Medicare and included allied health practitioners, she said.

“It’s really just successive governments have not addressed the problem, which is a problem of the system, and payment integrity.

“Of course fraudsters, need to be put in hail, quite frankly.”

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