There is growing disgust with the medical specialists who have a stranglehold on the Ontario Medical Association (OMA). What is really needed is a way for doctors to ensure that their representatives are really representing them. What is sucking all the value out of the OMA these days is the ongoing fight by the specialists to prevent the public from learning how much they are being paid for their services.
After repeated rulings against the specialists by the provincial privacy commissioner and the provincial courts, the specialists are now spending their colleagues’ money on an appeal to the Supreme Court.
The simple facts are that what a doctor bills the province for services rendered to the public under Medicare, is not private and personal information. That is public money and how it is spent must be transparent. Most people have an understanding that a doctor has to pay for his office space, staff and supplies. There are different models of practices today but the young general practitioner who still has to pay off student loans is very lucky to be taking home more than $125,000.
The specialist who has to put in many more years of training certainly deserves more than that but when you find ophthalmologists are easily netting more than $400,000, there seems to be an imbalance in the system.
Part of the obvious problems are the advancing technologies. For the Ontario government to cut back an ophthalmologists’ procedures to save money is a ludicrous solution. For people in the hinterlands of the province having to wait up to two years for cataract solutions is not the answer.
If the OMA wants to be nothing but a union demanding top dollar for their workers, then they better get used to the hard bargaining in return. We certainly have to stop this obduracy of the OMA waiting for a conciliator who is going to give them half of what they demand—which is what they wanted in the first place.
Until the OMA actually cares about the entire body of more than 28,000 doctors in the province, and works with them to improve their daily work in medicine, it is going to build resistance to its tactics. Working together is still a solution that can work for all. The specialists need to try it.
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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry
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