It doesn't make any difference as to whether you had seen your FS previous to Jan 1st or not, unfortunately
After asking the girl at medicare when we claimed everything, she explained it to me like this...
By law, you are not allowed to claim back the $$ from medicare for your management fee until 20 weeks - we missed out by a week as I was 20 weeks in the 2nd week of Jan.... grrrr!
(Some OB's have let you pay/claim early, but they can lose the medical licence if caught).
If we had been 20 weeks before the change, we would have gotten back 80% of our OB's management fees (saying we had reached the safetynet, which we had as we had done 2 rounds of IVF within the calendar year).
With the changes now, though - its just a set amount no matter what your OB charges (the governments attempts to make OB's have to be more competitive with their fees)
So no matter if your fees are around the $1500 mark (like Beemas) or the $6000 mark (like Lou), you still only get the same amount back - which is approx $470.
Our OB's management fee was $4500 - and $100 per visit.
We got back $470 from the $4500 (ouch!) and about $80 from the $100.
If baby had been concieved 9 days earlier we would've gotten $3600 back instead of the crummy $470
(Although I'm counting my lucky stars, though, as we were lucky enough to get 80% back on the 2 IVF cycles we'd done that year, so you can't have everything I guess )
After having bub, we just got the last account from our OB - which was $1300 for the c/s.
I'm yet to claim that back to see what percentage we get from medicare - but I'm not expecting to get much, as I know my OB is pretty exxy compared to most.... bummer, but we wouldn't have gone with anyone else, & for what we've been through to get our little man, any price was worth it for us... like Lou, he's our million dollar baby
Hoping all of my natter makes sense
Last edited by Hollybolly; June 10th, 2010 at 05:54 PM.
Hollybolly has explained well! Just another thing to remember, keep all your receipts. As with out of pocket expenses you may be able to claim through tax. As in when you hit the $1500 out of pocket threshold (medical) for ATO you can get back 20c in the dollar? after that $1500 threshold. So keep all receipts and remember to request Tax statements from Medicare, your private health fund, Pharmacy (scripts).
Thankyou everyone for posting and helping to clarify the issue as you can see there were quite a few of us feeling very confused
If you register online for Medicare you cna also access all your statements there, I will definitely keep the OOP expenses in mind when it comes to tax time as well. I don't know if we have kept al our pharmacy receipts, but gee they add up to a lot with the amount of Meds that DD and DH are on!
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