Norman Swan

But you'll find a fair bit of skepticism amongst some specialists about this.

I'm just, you know... Of course, that is absolutely right.

Okay.

And some of these mainstream companies are producing their own biosimilars, so Pfizer, Sandoz and others.

So there's a lot of money here.

They may not be saving quite as much as they could, but it's an interesting issue.

Can you hear my tummy rumbling?

So you're not really diagnosing the IBS.

You're seeing whether you've missed something.

You're with The Health Report on ABC Radio National.

So you've got these people coming in.

So you looked at a very large data set of people coming through general practice to see what happened to them.

And you looked at whether or not they were investigated.

And this is retrospective.

So you looked at the people who were diagnosed with bowel cancer eventually and then what their journey was through general practice.

Is that right?

Well, they might be facing a difficult judgment call, Shilke, but what you showed was that if you came from a rich area, a wealthy suburb, you were much more likely to get investigated than if you were from a disadvantaged suburb.

Isn't part of this also that if you're a GP in a disadvantaged area, your patients are less likely to be insured and therefore you're throwing them at the mercy of the public system with long waiting lists.

So in the back of your mind it might be, well, I might refer them for a colonoscopy, but it's going to be six months before they actually get one, even longer.

Yes.