Community action keeps eye injections accessible for people with private health insurance 

On Friday 6 March 2026, the Federal Health Minister, the Hon. Mark Butler MP, announced that the Federal Department of Health, Disability and Ageing will not proceed with the proposed Medicare reclassification which would have prevented people from using their private health insurance to pay for eye injection treatment services.

This means that for people with macular disease who currently received their eye injection treatment in private hospitals and day surgery settings, there will be no change to their ability to make private health insurance claims for this procedure.

Macular Disease Foundation Australia would like to thank the more than 500 people who wrote letters in support of stopping this reclassification from happening.

While this reclassification would have directly impacted access to sight-saving eye injections for more than 12,200 people¹ the government has ultimately avoided an eye health crisis. In reality, this change would have impacted on all 117,000 people receiving eye injection treatment¹ due to increased pressure on existing private in-room treatment and overstretched public hospital outpatient treatment services.

Eye injection treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other macular diseases is usually frequent and lifelong, and unlike other long-term health conditions where adequate public outpatient services are available.

This reclassification was originally recommended by the Medicare Review Taskforce in 2020, with initial implementation scheduled to begin on 1 July 2025. Following Macular Disease Foundation’s recommendation on the need for this reclassification to be paused and reviewed, the Federal Government delayed the implementation to 1 July 2026 and announced further consultations.

As the representative organisation for the macular disease community, Macular Disease Foundation participated in these consultations and informed the government that is reclassification would directly impact on the ability of people with macular disease to access to sight-saving eye injection treatment.

While this advocacy campaign has been successful in stopping this reclassification, Macular Disease Foundation will continue to work with the Federal Government to improve the affordability of treatment and increase access to public eye injection services, with the following recommendations being our key priorities. Positively, the government has acknowledged there are wider issues of access to treatment that exist, particularly in the private system, and has undertaken to look further at the affordability of specialist care across the health sector.

Recommendation 1: Reform the Extended Medicare Safety Net

The intention of this recommendation is to reduce the financial burden of the out-of-pocket costs for people receiving long-term private eye injection treatment.

Macular Disease Foundation has recommended that the government reforms the Extended Medicare Safety Net, so that it does not reset at the start of the calendar year for pension card holders receiving ongoing eye injection treatment for neovascular AMD, from the 2^nd calendar year after starting treatment.

Recommendation 2: Establish a Neovascular AMD Treatment Incentive Program

The intention of this recommendation is to encourage ophthalmologists to bulk bill pension card holders having eye injections for neovascular AMD, to support those most financially vulnerable, and therefore most at risk of stopping treatment due to burden of cost. 

This recommendation is modelled after the Federal Government’s successful Practice Incentives Program for General Practitioners, to provide ophthalmologists who bulk bill treatment for pensioners with a financial incentive to encourage more bulk billing.

Read our media release here. 

References

^1. Services Australia data on eye injection services delivered between 01/01/2022 to 31/12/2023, processed up to 17 February 2025. 

Posted: 11 March 2026