Medicare Safety Net – Make Sure You’re Enrolled
The Medicare Safety Net is designed to help cover the costs of all Medicare-Rebatable services in a calendar year, per family.
Costs of living are increasing, including for health care. We wish the government was able to provide a medicare rebate that, in any way, reflected the cost of seeing a doctor. But sadly, the time for this has long gone.
There are two safety nets that may help your family afford health care over the year.
One is the Pharmaceuticals Safety Net. This safety net makes sure that once you hit a certain dollar amount of out of pocket expenses for medication, the government will pay the rest. Please make sure you have registered all your families for this to get maximum benefit.
The second is the Medicare Safety Net. Again, you need to register your family for this. This is a safety net you WILL hit if you have private obstetric care, or see many medical specialists and have several expensive radiological investigations in 12 months. Once you hit the safety net, the government will cover 80% of the TOTAL COST of any further appointments.
The safety net dollar value changes depending on your family’s concession entitlements. Depending on your entitlements, you need to spend a total of $717.09 to $2249.80 per family, before being eligible for the government to cover 80% of all of your medical costs.
It is worthwhile ensuring you are registered as a family, as well as making sure you are registered for any centrelink benefits you are entitled to such as Family Tax Benefit A.
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