Author: Melinda McGee
Published: 26 March 2026

For many Australians, a routine doctor’s visit is no longer routine. What was once a straightforward trip to the GP perhaps a 20-minute drive and a bulk-billed consultation now involves a quiet calculation that has nothing to do with symptoms or referrals.

It’s about the cost of getting there.

With unleaded petrol averaging above $2.36 per litre nationally as of late March 2026, and diesel surging past $2.80 in many parts of the country, the cost-of-living crisis has found its way into one of the most essential parts of daily life: healthcare access. For a growing number of Australians, fuel costs are no longer a minor inconvenience. They are a genuine barrier to medical care.

And increasingly, people are choosing not to go.

Australia is in the grip of its most acute fuel crisis in modern memory. Triggered by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the disruption of oil shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz, fuel prices have climbed sharply since early 2026. The national average for unleaded 91 has risen from around $1.69 per litre in late February to $2.36 by mid-March, according to the ACCC and FuelRadar’s weekly monitoring data. Diesel, the backbone of freight and rural transport, has hit $2.80 per litre nationally, with isolated reports of $3.00 per litre in parts of Sydney.

But fuel is not the only pressure. Private health insurance premiums rose by 4.41 per cent from 1 April 2026 the steepest increase in nearly a decade. Headline inflation sits at 3.8 per cent, with electricity costs having risen more than 30 per cent over the past year. Mortgage repayments remain elevated. Grocery bills continue to climb.

The result is a household budget under relentless pressure from every direction. And healthcare, particularly the kind that doesn’t feel immediately urgent, is quietly falling off the priority list.

This is not a theoretical risk. Australians are already skipping healthcare in significant numbers. Research from the Australian Healthcare Index found that 53 per cent of Australians reported cutting back on GP visits due to rising costs. A Finder survey identified 15 per cent of the population reducing their visits to doctors and dentists specifically because of financial pressure. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia has reported that one in five Australians have delayed or skipped filling prescriptions in the past three years because of cost a figure that rises to one in three in regional areas.

Now, add a fuel crisis to that equation.

The pattern emerging across the country is not one of dramatic refusal. It is something quieter. Appointments are being spaced further apart. Non-urgent visits are being pushed back indefinitely. Allied health sessions physiotherapy, psychology, speech therapy are being reduced from weekly to fortnightly, or dropped entirely. Patients are not calling to cancel. They are simply not rebooking.

General practice sits at the centre of Australia’s health system. It is the gateway to specialist referrals, mental health treatment plans, medication scripts, and preventive screening. When patients reduce their GP visits, the consequences compound. Conditions that might have been caught early are missed. Chronic diseases go unmonitored. Mental health concerns escalate without intervention. The decline in bulk billing with 22 per cent of GPs recently changing their billing model according to a Healthed survey means that even reaching a GP now carries an out-of-pocket cost, on top of the fuel required to get there.

Allied health appointments are among the first to be cut when household budgets tighten. Unlike a GP visit that might be bulk-billed, most allied health consultations carry a gap fee. When you add a $50 to $80 round trip in fuel on top of a $40 to $60 out-of-pocket fee for the session itself, the effective cost of a single physiotherapy or psychology appointment can exceed $120 a sum many families simply cannot justify on a weekly or fortnightly basis.

For NDIS participants, the situation carries unique complexity. While the scheme provides transport funding across three levels from $1,784 to $3,456 per year depending on circumstances these allocations were designed for a different fuel price environment. At current prices, a participant travelling 40 kilometres each way to a weekly therapy session could exhaust their annual transport budget in a matter of months. The NDIS itself has acknowledged that therapy travel costs are draining participant funding faster than expected, with updated claiming rules introduced from July 2025 to address the imbalance.

The statistics tell part of the story. But the real weight of this crisis is felt in individual households, in the quiet decisions people are making every week about what they can and cannot afford.

These are not extreme cases. They are the kinds of calculations millions of Australians are now making.

When people stop accessing healthcare, the effects are rarely immediate. They accumulate. And by the time they become visible, the damage is often significantly worse and significantly more expensive to treat.

In the short term, delayed care means missed early intervention. A skin lesion that could have been flagged at a routine check-up becomes a late-stage melanoma diagnosis. A child’s developmental delay, untreated for months, becomes harder to correct. A mental health condition that could have been managed with regular psychology sessions escalates into a crisis requiring emergency department intervention. The window for prevention quietly closes.

The long-term picture is more confronting. Research consistently demonstrates that populations who delay or forgo recommended care experience higher rates of hospitalisation, more complex comorbidities, and greater reliance on acute and emergency services. University of Sydney research has found that nearly one million Australians forgo necessary medical treatment each year, and one in three fear they would not be able to afford care if they became seriously ill. Medical Journal of Australia data shows that up to half of Australians with certain chronic conditions avoid care because of cost.

For the health system, these are not isolated incidents. They are emerging patterns that, left unaddressed, will translate into a measurable increase in hospital admissions, longer waitlists, and greater demand on already-stretched emergency departments.

There is a deep irony at the heart of this crisis. The very act of skipping healthcare to save money almost always leads to higher costs down the line both for the individual and for the system.

A GP consultation, even one carrying a gap fee, typically costs the system between $40 and $90 through Medicare. An emergency department presentation, by contrast, averages $705 nationally and more than $1,030 if the patient is admitted, according to the National Hospital Cost Data Collection. A single preventable hospitalisation can cost tens of thousands of dollars in public funding.

The Productivity Commission has estimated that improving the health of Australians in fair or poor health could increase GDP by $4 billion per year. The Prevention Centre’s research is unambiguous: prevention not only lowers healthcare costs, it reduces the broader economic burden of premature death and years lived with disability.

And yet, the economic pressures of 2026 are pushing Australians in exactly the opposite direction away from prevention and toward crisis. Every missed appointment, every delayed prescription, every cancelled therapy session is a small investment in a larger, more expensive problem.

For many providers, understanding whether services remain financially viable under these conditions is becoming critical. The economics of healthcare delivery are shifting in real time, and the ripple effects are being felt on both sides of the consultation room.

If the fuel crisis is a barrier in metropolitan Australia, it is something closer to a wall in regional and rural communities.

For patients outside major cities, healthcare has always involved travel. A specialist appointment might mean a 200-kilometre round trip. A therapy session for a child with a disability could require an hour’s drive each way. These distances were already a burden. At current fuel prices, they are becoming prohibitive.

The crisis is compounded by supply-side issues. Regional fuel stations have been disproportionately affected by diesel shortages, with the ACCC reporting that hundreds of stations across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia ran low or out of at least one fuel type during March 2026. In some communities, the question is not just whether people can afford to drive to their appointment it is whether fuel is available at all.

Geography has always shaped healthcare access in Australia. But in 2026, it has become a health risk multiplier. The further a patient lives from a service, the more exposed they are to the fuel crisis and the more likely they are to disengage from care entirely.

The Australian Trucking Association’s spokesperson captured the broader dynamic when he noted that regional areas always bear the sharpest pain during fuel shocks, with costs flowing through to every aspect of community life. Healthcare is no exception.

The signals are not hypothetical. Across the healthcare sector, providers are reporting patterns that align with what the data suggests: patients are pulling back.

Cancellation rates for allied health appointments have risen. No-show rates for GP clinics, particularly those in outer suburban and regional areas, are climbing. NDIS providers are reporting that participants are reducing the frequency of their sessions, not because their goals have been met, but because they cannot sustain the cost of attendance.

As a recent Therapy Insights investigation highlighted, the fuel crisis is not only affecting patients — it is quietly shutting down the viability of disability and allied health providers who depend on consistent client attendance to sustain their operations. When patients stop coming, providers face revenue instability, scheduling gaps, and the difficult decision of whether to continue operating at a loss or reduce their own services.

This creates a feedback loop. Fewer patients attending leads to provider instability. Provider instability leads to reduced service availability. Reduced availability pushes remaining patients further away, increasing their travel costs and further discouraging attendance. The system does not just weaken it contracts.

It is worth pausing to recognise how this situation arose. Australia’s fuel crisis is not a domestic policy failure alone. It is the direct consequence of a geopolitical conflict thousands of kilometres away the ongoing US-Israel-Iran war, which has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and sent global oil prices surging.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen confirmed in late March that six oil shipments bound for Australia in April had been turned back or deferred. Petrol reserves stood at 38 days, with diesel and jet fuel at 30 days. Defence analysts and economic commentators have described Australia’s fuel reserve position as deeply inadequate, the product of decades of policy inaction on energy security.

The connection between a conflict in the Middle East and a missed physiotherapy appointment in Tamworth may seem abstract. But as Therapy Insights has previously analysed, the supply chain linking global energy markets to local healthcare delivery is shorter and more fragile than most Australians realise. When fuel becomes expensive or scarce, every service that depends on transport and healthcare is fundamentally a transport-dependent service comes under pressure.

If current trends continue and there is little indication of imminent fuel price relief several outcomes are likely to unfold over the coming months.

This is not a story that will lead the evening news. There are no queues outside hospitals, no dramatic shortages of medication, no single moment of crisis that captures the nation’s attention.

What is happening is slower, and in many ways more concerning. Across Australia, people are quietly disengaging from the healthcare system. They are making small, rational decisions based on their household budgets decisions that, in isolation, seem manageable, but in aggregate represent a significant and growing public health risk.

The research is clear. When people skip care, they get sicker. When they get sicker, they cost the system more. When the system absorbs more acute demand, it has less capacity for prevention. And the cycle deepens.

Policy responses the reduction in PBS co-payments to $25 from January 2026, the government’s fuel supply taskforce, the NDIS transport funding adjustments are important steps. But they are not keeping pace with the scale of the problem. The gap between what Australians need and what they can afford to access is widening in real time.

The issue isn’t just rising costs it’s the growing number of Australians quietly going without care. One missed appointment at a time.

About Melinda McGee
Melinda McGee is a healthcare economics writer specialising in cost pressures, funding models, and system sustainability across NDIS and aged care.

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- NDIS Support Categories Explained: What’s Funded and What’s Not — 2026 Guide
- How the US-Israel-Iran War Could Disrupt NDIS Services and Aged Care in Australia