Close to 500k Australians could have missed out on savings at the pharmacy

In short:

Pharmacists say the bureaucracy of the PBS Safety Net, a government scheme which gives millions of Australians cheaper medicine, is so "clunky" thousands of people are missing out.

Examples of the scheme's shortcomings, advocates say, include needing to use snail mail to file paperwork and not having a centralised system to calculate patients' spending.

What's next?

Consumer advocates and pharmacists have called on the government to invest in the scheme.