Your supermarket can discount bread. Your servo can discount petrol. But strict rules stop your pharmacy discounting most medicines.

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The government sets caps on how much Australians pay for a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) prescription: $25, or $7.70 if you have a concession card.

Every medicine has a set price. If the price is below your cap, you pay the whole cost and the pharmacy can offer you a discount. But most scripts cost more. For these, you pay up to your cap, the government covers the rest, and discounts are basically banned.

It wasn't always this way. In 2015, the government gave pharmacies the option to discount more medicines, but only by $1 per script. No pharmacy was forced to do it, they were just given a choice. Even so, the backlash from pharmacy owners was fierce.

After sustained lobbying from the Pharmacy Guild, the lobby group for pharmacy owners, the government agreed to phase out the discounts. If you don't have a concession card, the discounts are already gone. If you do have a concession card, they will be gone by 2029.

Technically, pharmacies can still offer discounts on PBS medicines with a set price between $25 and $51. But when they do, they give up any government subsidy they would have received - so it's no surprise that those discounts are rare.

All these rules mean one thing: patients are missing out on real savings.

Pharmacies are willing to compete on price when they are allowed to. For prescriptions where you pay less than the cap amount, there are no limits on discounting. For these medicines, pharmacies on average knock $3 off the price for every single........

© Canberra Times