So they came up with an ingenious scheme to encourage doctors to charge no more. Those who chose to accept just 85 per cent of the scheduled fee would get a Rolls-Royce payments service. In return for sacrificing 15 per cent of their reasonable fee and the right to add more on top, they would be paid automatically and wouldn't need to hassle their patients. They wouldn't even need tills. If they wanted more, all of the convenience would be withdrawn. They would have to present their patients with bills setting out the full horror of what they were charged. In those days, before the widespread adoption of credit cards, the patients would have to pay by cash or cheques. And they would have to claim the rebate themselves, quite possibly travelling into town to do it. Doctors who chose this route would be disadvantaged. Over time they would lose customers to those who bulk-billed.

Illustration: Joe Benke

The Coalition twice knocked it back in the Senate, forcing Whitlam to call a double dissolution. When the newly re-elected Senate rejected it again he called Australia's first joint sitting of both houses of parliament to ram it through, fending off a High Court challenge from the Coalition in the process. (Malcolm Turnbull has threatened a second joint sitting later this year, in order to get his Building and Construction Commission legislation through).

The full scheme had been operating for only a month when Whitlam lost his job. While campaigning, the Coalition's Malcolm Fraser promised to maintain it, but in office wound it back. The authors of the best account of what happened, Making Medicare, Anne-Marie Boxall and James Gillespie say "even at the time it was difficult for people to understand the Fraser government's changes".

He abolished bulk-billing for everyone but pensioners and the disadvantaged, made private health insurance compulsory on pain of a tax levy, then made it voluntary, then abolished Labor's scheme altogether.