Conservative Leader Patrick Brown will do anything to get himself elected premier in the next Ontario election. Making blatant use of Ontario’s doctors is just another sleazy tactic for an unprincipled political manipulator. And he is appealing to their greed.
Truth and honesty be damned. Brown wants to use a radicalized Ontario Medical Association (OMA) as a surgical scalpel to emasculate the Ontario Liberals. He has always used doctors in his political gamesmanship and now he has the entire profession locked in battle. They are playing his game.
It started last summer when, after three years of inaction, the Ontario government offered the OMA negotiators a settlement. Brown immediately announced that he would have offered arbitration. That was what his supporters among the doctors wanted. It was the easy route for politicians as they had to go through middleman negotiators anyway. And Brown knew it was an easy solution to load on the taxpayers. His organizers urged the doctors to reject the Liberal government’s offer. And they did.
That was when the archaic and unwieldy structure of the OMA started to come apart. It finally resulted in the six-member executive deciding to step down. While still serving on the Board, they have left the doctor’s organization without management control and direction until a new board is elected this month. This vote has the potential to radicalize the board and bring a more demanding (read greedier) executive into office.
This all fits the behind-the-scenes strategy of Patrick Brown and his close friend Walied Soliman who is the lawyer for a group of radicalized doctors. It is working. It is pitting medical specialties against other specialties as each fight to increase or maintain unrealistic fees for their services. The Ontario government has hardly helped in this as it has had to arbitrarily reduce fees for some specialties to reflect changes in technology.
This action by Ontario doctors is not only going to dig much deeper into the taxpayers’ pockets but it is going to end the farce of the OMA being anything other than a union. It has put doctor dissatisfaction with their payment ahead of the quality of service that Ontario patients have come to expect.
While your doctor bills the province for his or her fees, it is unfair to suggest that it is all income. The assumption is that even a family doctor with an average staff to pay and reasonable office costs is going to be in the $200,000 per year tax bracket. Those years of medical training and their cost are soon compensated.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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