Doctors rally against health-care cuts at Queen's Park

Several hundred doctors and patients gathered outside the Ontario legislature on Saturday, calling for the governing Liberal party to "fund health, not scandals."

The rally to protest spending cuts to the health-care system came a day after Health Minister Eric Hoskins announced that more than 500 doctors had billed the province's health insurance plan more than $1 million each last year. Hoskins said one doctor billed OHIP $6.6 million.

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He added that the top-billing doctors represent less than two per cent of physicians in the province, but account for nearly 10 per cent of billings.

Saturday's rally was organized by an group called Concerned Ontario Doctors, and was attended by Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown and PC health critic Jeff Yurek.

"We need the Ontario Liberals to step up and start doing their damn job and start managing health care properly — so people stop suffering on wait lists, they stop dying on wait lists," Dr. Nadia Alam, a general practitioner and anesthesiologist from Georgetown, Ont., said to reporters. 

Alam said government cuts are hurting patients across the province. She also dismissed the one per cent funding increase in the recent provincial budget as a "bandage solution." 

"Inflation increases by so much more," she said. 

'A scandal a day'

Protesters, some wearing lab coats, held printed signs that read "a scandal a day pushes the doctor away" and "care not cuts." A dog wore a homemade sign on its back, which read "stop cuts to my mum's pay."

Brown said that Hoskins made his announcement about physician spending in an effort to turn doctors against one another.

"I don't think we need a health minister who's going to demonize doctors," he said, eliciting cries of "Shame!" from the crowd.

Health is the biggest item in Ontario's 2016 budget, comprising about 42 per cent of the province's total program spending. But doctors say that isn't enough, and because of a lack of funding, family practices and hospitals are having to close their doors.

Dr. Suzanne Dullege, a family physician in Madoc, Ont., said that her practice's lab was shut down due to spending cuts.

"That leaves a practice with 6,000 patients with no lab. The closest lab is 45 minutes away," she said. "We have thousands of patients getting lab work, and so the doctors had to pick up that cost ... to the tune of $8,000 each per year."

She said Hoskins' announcement about doctors' billing misrepresents how much money doctors actually make.

"That's not what they take home," she said. "That has to go to pay for all the overhead, all the people who are salaried."

No cap on billings

When making his announcement Friday, Hoskins noted that the province spends $11 billion annually on physician compensation, but has to find hundreds of millions of dollars more at the end of year because there are no caps on billings by doctors, who earn an average of $368,000.

The group that represents doctors, the Ontario Medical Association, has said that the best way to regulate billings is for the government to agree to binding arbitration, something Hoskins said he was willing to consider if the doctors return to negotiations, which broke off in January 2015.

The government has been locked in a fight with the OMA, which represents about 34,000 doctors and medical students, since it imposed a series of fee cuts last year.