[DharmaPolice]

It may amount to fraud but in the context of that service, no record was kept of calls not resulting in an appointment. My wife was a receptionist at a GPs around the time the article mentions and in some cases it was worse than that - if you phoned and asked for an appointment, if they couldn't give you one within 48 hours they wouldn't offer one at all - telling you to call back later / the next day.

Although the New Yorker piece has leaned on the bonus angle the way it was discussed publicly was that doctors weren't allowed to offer you appointments outside the 48 hour window [0].

It was a very silly interpretation of the rules, but I think GPs felt it was too rigid and therefore stuck to the letter rather than the spirit.

0 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3682920.stm