Community to confront Labor over health cuts

Victorian Socialists are joining healthcare workers and community members in expressing outrage at the decision  made by the CoHealth executive team to close its medical clinics in Collingwood, Fitzroy, and Kensington; ending GP services by December 2025 and closing the Collingwood site entirely by mid-2026. This closure will include an end to pharmacy services, through which the opioid replacement program is run, as well as nursing, counselling and allied health services. These decisions were made without community consultation, and staff—many of whom will lose their jobs—were notified by email on the same day the public announcement was made.

The closure of these clinics will be nothing short of catastrophic. These sites collectively serve around 12,500 of the most vulnerable Victorians; including refugees, newly arrived migrants, people experiencing homelessness, those with disabilities, and patients with complex chronic health needs. Decades of deliberate underfunding by both Labor and Liberal governments have gutted community health and mean that these patients will struggle to access another bulk-billed service. Medicare rebates have been stagnant for years causing private practices to continue raising their out of pocket costs, rendering their services inaccessible to most. Patients will be forced into already overcrowded emergency departments, where every non-urgent visit costs taxpayers over $500 instead of the standard $42 for a GP consult. Many will simply go without care until it’s too late.

The federal government’s Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program (BBPIP)—touted as a fix for primary care—fails to meet the scale of the crisis. Its flat 12.5% bulk billing incentive rewards short, low-complexity consults and penalises clinics that care for complex patients. At the same time, Urgent Care Centres are being rolled out across Victoria as a stopgap measure. These centres operate on an episodic, walk-in model, offering no continuity of care or management for chronic conditions. They are five times more expensive per consult and further fragment our healthcare system.

Australia’s public health system is in free fall—run down by decades of bipartisan neglect and unrelenting privatisation. Hospitals are overflowing, ambulance ramping has become routine, and exhausted healthcare workers are being pushed past breaking point. We must end the profiteering that treats health as a commodity and rebuild a universal public health system—one where healthcare is free, fully funded, and guaranteed as a human right for every person.

On Saturday November 8 Victorian Socialists have called a rally outside Federal Labor MP Sarah Witty’s office to demand:
Immediate intervention by the Victorian and Federal Governments to stop the Cohealth closures with no interruption to services
A public, fully-funded community health system—free, universal, and democratically controlled by the communities it serves.

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