[Newsbot]

Title: Cap on doctors could mean 'loss of tremendous talent' for Alberta, student leader warns
Category: Provincial Politics
Posted By: Alta_redneck
Date: 2017-02-01 21:11:28
Canadian

[Alta_redneck]

Not going to cut high paying heathcare union jobs, we'll cut Drs instead. The stupidity just oozes more every day.

[DrCaleb]

Or we could pay higher taxes to pay for them . . . the population isn't getting any smaller, after all.

But I wholly agree. Our health care is freaking excellent. We shouldn't jeopardize it's future.

[Sunnyways]

One problem is fee inertia where a long and complex procedure becomes fast and simple e.g. cataract removal. An ophthalmologist popping cataracts can easily earn three times as much as a general surgeon removing a colon in the same time period.

[BartSimpson]

Sounds like the USA will shortly be the recipient of some wonderfully educated immigrants! Thank you, Canada!

[Sunnyways]

There should be transparency on physician income across Canada. This is taxpayers' money. The Ontario Sunshine List is nonsense because all the big earners are omitted.

[DrCaleb]

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

There should be transparency on physician income across Canada. This is taxpayers' money. The Ontario Sunshine List is nonsense because all the big earners are omitted.

That's not how the system works though. Doctors run a private enterprise, and bill governments for their services that are covered under provincial plans. If we want to see their incomes on a sunshine list, then they have to be government employees.

That also defeats the cost savings we get through them being third parties. You can't demand to publish the incomes of a corporate CEO, and that is essentially what normal Doctors are.

[Lemmy]

4

[DrCaleb]

Lemmy Lemmy:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

If we want to see their incomes on a sunshine list, then they have to be government employees.

Not true, at least in Ontario. There are all kinds of non-government employees on our sunshine list. Teachers, for example, aren't government employees. They're school board employees and school boards are regulated private entities, like doctors' practices, which submit their expenses to gov't for payment.

In Alberta, Doctors offices outside of hospitals are self employed private corporations.

$1:

As a resident, you are paid according to the contract negotiated for you by PARA. You may opt to continue the security of an agreed-upon salary (unaffected by the number of services performed) by accepting a position as an employee or contractor with a hospital or other organization.

Unlike a self-employed physician, you may not be able to deduct expenses from your income such as professional association fees or malpractice insurance.

https://www.albertadoctors.org/services ... e-practice

There are many who bill services to Alberta Health, who are subject to and on the sunshine list.

$1:

Eight of the 10 physicians who billed the most to Alberta Health last year were radiologists, but the group representing those practitioners insists the multi-million-dollar billings don't come close to representing their take-home pay.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ ... -1.3664517

But it's their practice, not their salary as an employee of that corporation that is subject to scrutiny.

We can't just go to a Doctor that does some work that's billed to the province, and some that is paid for privately (plastic surgery for example) and demand to know how much they make a year.

[DrCaleb]

Another example too - clinical testing is contracted to a single company. So any blood tests for example, are done in a number of labs across the province by one private corporation, for a flat rate.

The amount paid to that corporation is public, but what compensation the company pays it's staff isn't.

[Lemmy]

$

[DrCaleb]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Here too. The hypocrisy (among many hypocrisies around the SS list) for me is that teachers are on it while doctors aren't when, legally speaking, their employment relationships with government are virtually identical.

I'm not a big fan of Sunshine lists. I see the need for transparency, but I know there are also a lot of nutbars out there who would use the information in ways it wasn't intended.

That's also why certain ministries are exempt from the list. Justice Department for example.

[Lemmy]

+

[Sunnyways]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

There should be transparency on physician income across Canada. This is taxpayers' money. The Ontario Sunshine List is nonsense because all the big earners are omitted.

That's not how the system works though. Doctors run a private enterprise, and bill governments for their services that are covered under provincial plans. If we want to see their incomes on a sunshine list, then they have to be government employees.

That also defeats the cost savings we get through them being third parties. You can't demand to publish the incomes of a corporate CEO, and that is essentially what normal Doctors are.

Actually, it is already how the system works in, for example, BC.

http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/health ... ok2016.pdf

It's not a complete list but more complete than any Ontario one that I'm aware of. At the moment in NL, there is an FOI request to make a list of physician income paid by the local equivalent of OHIP available to the public.

The 'private enterprise' most Canadian doctors run is a very peculiar one. There is, for example, no competition on price, no fear that another business is going to set up down the street next week, undercut you by 50% and close you down - which is how free enterprise generally works. As I mentioned before, the current fee schedule often does not take into account the time or difficulty of the procedure or the likelihood of being sued doing it.

The real costs incurred by physicians vary greatly by specialty. Some are substantial and others are 'perfectly legal' paper costs designed to avoid tax, e.g. paying family members generously as members of the corporation.

The current list in Ontario gives the public the false impression that physicians in the middle of the pack are the high earners. Any fair analysis of the actual incomes earned by some FFS specialists - whatever their alleged overheads - will tell you this is clearly not the case. The list should either be all or nothing.

[Sunnyways]

I'm not sure how well some of you guys would cope with a move to Norway:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/ ... -the-field