Massive change coming to Medicare in the New Year
Medicare’s phone line will no longer be open 24 hours a day as part of the 2025 customer service shake-up.
The change, which comes into effect on January 2, means Australians can only call Medicare from 7am to 10pm on weekdays and 7am to 7pm on weekends.
It follows an internal investigation by Services Australia, which found that only one per cent of all calls received to Medicare occurred outside these hours.
A Services Australia spokesperson said the change will help “re-allocate staff to priority Medicare work”, such as processing claims or calls on other 24-hour emergency lines.
“We regularly review our business practices to ensure we deliver our services efficiently and effectively,” the spokesperson said.
They attributed the change to the introduction of Medicare’s online claims tracker, which has “helped reduce the number of telephone inquiries.”
The online service, which remains accessible 24/7, has been used ‘more than 1.8 million times in an average of 12 seconds per check’.
Just months after it was revealed, unanswered calls to Centrelink almost doubled to more than 11 million in the year to March 31, 2024.
Phone lines to Medicare will no longer be available 24/7 from January 2 and will now be limited to 7am – 10pm on weekdays and 7am – 7pm on weekends from January 2 (stock image)
The change follows an internal review by Services Australia, which found less than one percent of calls came from outside the new hours (stock image)
Services Australia figures revealed in July showed there had been 11,268,048 congestion notices, compared to 6,997,300 in the previous 12-month period.
Congestion messages are the automated recordings that tell people waiting in the queue that staff are too busy to answer them.
Those trying to reach someone are redirected to online services, only to be abruptly disconnected.
Nearly two million of the dropped calls went to the disability, illness and carers line, and those that did get through still had to wait an average of 47 minutes.
And these huge numbers don’t even include unanswered calls from Medicare and Centrelink aged care clients, who were hung up more than a million times.
That figure was a disturbing increase of 27,500 percent over last year’s figure, when only 4,067 people were hanged.
Thousands of extra staff have been hired to work with Centrelink, trained to take calls and process claims by April in response to the devastating figures.
Hank Jongen, managing director of Services Australia, claimed that ‘congestion notification usage has halved since January’ and wait times have reduced.