To the Editor: Over the past two years, the Journal has pointed out the health hazards and the lack of logic in the Health Insurance Commission’s closure of its previously cost-effective and successful “Doctor Shopping Hotline”.1-4 But it has taken the death of a 25-year-old “prescription shopper” in Cairns, his crusading mother, a scathing report by the Queensland Coroner5 and public exposure of these problems by Mark Bannerman on ABC TV (The 7.30 Report, 22 Dec 2004) for discernible action to occur.

On that program, the Federal Minister of Health and Ageing promised that a “Prescription Shopper Line” would be up and running by the end of January 2005, and indeed it was activated on 31 January.

This leaves two outstanding issues. The first is for the Health Insurance Commission to engage in an open exercise of mutual education by clearly reviewing its process of thinking in closing the previously successful Doctor Shopping Hotline and its lack of urgency in reinstituting its proposed better and broader successor.6

The second, and more important, issue is in understanding the underlying factors and thought processes of those doctors whom prescription shoppers describe as an “easy touch”. 7,8