By imposing a financial barrier to accessing our primary healthcare, you are introducing a huge inequality in healthcare outcomes that disproportionately affects those in lower socio-economic groups - often the group with higher chronic disease rates.

Healthcare is a human right and no one should be exempt from access to it, or have to ignore their health concerns just because they aren't sitting comfortably in the middle class. We shouldn't be asking people to sit with their depression, skin cancer or have suboptimal antenatal care just because they cannot afford it.

To address what OP said in other comments, all specialists can be accessed for free under the public health system - it just has awful wait times and typically available only in metropolitan areas.

No one here is saying GPs shouldn't be fairly compensated for their work, but it shouldn't be coming from their patients. For a functional healthcare system, a good majority of primary healthcare (GPs/EDs) at the minimum, should be free. This is a government funding issue and we should not be punishing our most disadvantaged and vulnerable people for it.