Holly Payne
Holly Payne follows the money and power around general practice, tracing how insurer deals, Medicare rules and training contracts translate into pressures on clinics and doctors at The Medical Republic. She works as an editor and medical journalist at the masthead, responsible for clinical updates and opinions alongside reporting on GP news, research and politics. Her recent coverage sits at the junction of finance and health policy, with a focus on ownership structures, regulation and funding flows in primary care.
Insurers and corporate ownership of GP practices
Payne’s most distinctive strand of work examines the growing role of private health insurers and other corporate players in owning general practices. In a recent piece on insurer ownership of group practices, she details how Bupa’s proposed takeover of Partnered Health would make it one of the largest general practice operators, tracking the number of clinics involved and the proportion of group practices now controlled by insurers.
She quantifies market share and translates those figures into clear statements about how many group GP clinics out of every 20 are in insurer hands, bringing a finance lens to what can otherwise look like a purely clinical sector. In parallel coverage for another GP-focused masthead, she reports on further acquisitions of practices by health insurers, linking the scale of these purchases with questions about whether they are ultimately good or bad for business and for independent GPs.
Across these stories, ownership percentages, clinic counts and comparative rankings are foregrounded, and she sets insurer strategy against existing corporate players to show where power is shifting in primary care.
Medicare rules, regulation and compliance
A second clear thread in Payne’s reporting is close scrutiny of Medicare settings and regulatory oversight, especially where they affect how GPs bill and test. She has covered changes to Medicare items related to vitamin B12 and urine testing, explaining how amendments are intended to increase efficiency while warning that they are likely to create headaches for GPs in day‑to‑day practice.
Another line of coverage follows Medicare compliance and enforcement, including stories on public tip‑offs about practices that charge illegal out‑of‑pocket fees while bulk billing, reported through senior health officials at senate estimates hearings. Her work also examines regulatory performance, such as reporting that the national practitioner regulator had left hundreds of notifications open for more than two years, highlighting how delay at the oversight level feeds back into pressure on clinicians and patients. She extends this accountability focus to tax and policy disputes, including reporting that drew on calls across every state and territory to test whether a joint college‑association payroll tax strategy would work for GPs in practice.
In these pieces she combines legislative and regulatory detail with concrete examples of how rules play out in frontline billing and compliance.
GP workforce, training and pay
Payne consistently returns to the economics and logistics of the GP workforce, looking at who is trained, who is paid and who carries the load.
She has reported on a major GP training contract worth around $1 billion, explaining that it will support the largest GP training cohort on record while noting that one college argues more places are still needed to meet demand. In companion coverage, she writes about supervisors who feel overlooked in the 2025 pay arrangements, contrasting strong gains for registrars with the financial squeeze on those responsible for their training.
Her stories on workforce and training sit alongside broader reporting on GP politics and tax, including the payroll tax stand‑off, to show how funding decisions, contractual arrangements and regulatory interpretations shape whether practices can recruit, retain and properly pay doctors. Across this strand of work she keeps attention on the numbers - contract values, cohort sizes, pay rises - and ties them to the lived experience of supervisors and trainees in general practice.
Editorial role and clinical coverage
Alongside her news reporting, Payne holds an editorial role at The Medical Republic that keeps her close to clinical content as well as opinion. She is listed as an editor responsible for clinical updates and opinions, indicating regular oversight of material that interprets new evidence and policy for GPs. Professional information about her role describes her as a medical journalist covering general practice, medical news, research and politics, reinforcing the blend of clinical and political subject matter in her remit.
Her portfolio includes pieces that move beyond pure finance into clinical policy, such as coverage of testing changes, regulatory notifications and senate scrutiny of health department decisions, but the through‑line remains the same: connecting policy detail and financial structures to the practical realities of day‑to‑day general practice.
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