Starting Friday, some patients will find that they will have to pay a discounted price for a highly-specialized medicine, but, on the other hand, everyone will have to pay a little more for their individual "taxpayer-subsidized prescriptions".

Under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, tenofovir will now be listed alongside emtracitabine and efavirenz, commercially marketed as Atripla, and the development is expected to garner a greater uptake of the treatment by patients of HIV who suffer from a rare and highly serious enzyme deficiency disorder.

Over a period of 4 years, the additional cost to the PBS will now be nearly $15 Million.

The annual automatic adjustments to the scheme, which will take effect starting Friday, will mean that co-payments for concessional card holders will surged by some 10 cents to $5.40 for every prescription, and general patients, on the other hand, will be paying $33.30, which is an addition of 40 cents.

As far as safety net thresholds go, these have also hiked to $324, which were previously $318 for concessional patients, and for general patients these have gone from $1,264 to $1,281.90.