Quebec Federation of Medical Specialists calls auditor general report 'misleading'
Last week’s report called out specialists for billing the province almost $400M more than budgeted
The Quebec Federation of Medical Specialists (FMSQ) says its doctors are being dragged in the mud.
The federation held a press conference Friday in reaction to last week's auditor general report. The report concluded that over the last five years, specialized doctors billed the province for $384 million more than what Quebec had expected to pay them.
The federation's president, Diane Francoeur, said that figure is closer to $65 million.
Francoeur said the discrepancy between the figures has to do with the fact that the auditor general's report did not make the distinction between premiums received by general practitioners and those received by specialized doctors.
"There's a lot of misleading and all the numbers are mixed together" Francoeur said, adding that it made it easy for people like Parti Quebecois leader Pierre Karl Péladeau to make false statements about how much money specialized doctors received.
She also said that of the 60,000 hours it took the auditor general to write the report, only two of those hours were spent meeting with the FMSQ.
"We were never able to explain [to] them exactly what the measures were…We wish this would have been done."
As far as how the report was going to affect members, Francoeur said that their track record with patients was more important than the auditor general's conclusions.
"We know in our offices on a daily basis that we do a good job and our patients know that. That's the most important."