Given it is health week, Mark Butler is a pretty busy beaver.

He was in WA with the prime minister yesterday and is back in his home state of South Australia this morning where he tells the ABC that Labor wants to see bulk billing get back to around 90%.

That’s the modelling we’ve done. It’s a very big investment, $8 billion of additional investment into Medicare. But there’s strings attached. Some of the doctors groups said give the additional funding and we’ll do the right thing.

No, I said we want an outcome for patients from this very big taxpayer investment and that outcome is bulk billing. Our modelling suggests once it flows through the system there will be an additional 18 million free visits to the GP. It’s good for people’s hip pocket, obviously, but we don’t want people deferring a visit to the doctor because of cost. It’s why we’re making medicines cheaper and we’re so heavily focused on bulk billing. Affordable free visits to the doctor is a critical to a well functioning health system.

The government is tripling the incentive for doctors to bulk bill, but so far, has not announced a change to the bulk billing rate itself. That matters because there are conditions to get the increased incentive that not all private doctor clinics can meet for a variety of reasons (but the main one is that for some GPs, it would be asking them to work for less pay)