Doctors, province return to bargaining
OMA lawyer seeking 3.6% budget increase; province eyes 1.9% boost
Arbitration hearings between the province and doctors have resumed following an aborted attempt by the government to pull the plug on the process.
Negotiating teams for the health ministry and Ontario Medical Association met at a downtown hotel Tuesday, picking up where they left off before last week’s sudden and controversial move by Premier Doug Ford’s office to bring binding arbitration — underway since May — to a halt.
Doctors have been without a contract since March 2014. The ensuing period has been tumultuous, marked by ugly infighting among doctors, a defeated ratification vote, a turnover of the OMA executive, a failed bid by the new Ford government to reach a negotiated settlement and then, last week, the province’s sudden withdrawal from arbitration and subsequent flip-flop.
The hearings are important because of the large amount of taxpayer dollars spent on physicians and because significant decisions are made about the provision of health services to patients.
The OMA, which represents Ontario’s 31,000 practising physicians, had the floor much of the day Tuesday. Its lawyers — Howard Goldblatt and Steven Barrett — countered earlier arguments put forth by the province.
Goldblatt said Ontario’s physician services budget should grow by 3.6 per cent for each of the next two years, an amount in line with previous increases. Ontario currently spends more than $12 billion annually on doctors. The province maintains that an annual hike of 1.9 per cent should be enough to cover the added demands on the health system.
But Golblatt said that does not take into account extra monies needed to cover the cost of caring for more patients with chronic and complex health needs. As well, extra funding is required to pay for a growing physician workforce and new technology.
The province maintains $200 million could be saved annually by cracking down on the provision of unnecessary and inappropriate services, for example, diagnostic tests that patients do not require.
Under phase two of arbitration between the OMA and the province, set to commence next year, the issue of “relativity” is going to be addressed. Relativity refers to large pay gaps between medical specialties.
The highest paid include what are known as the “Big Three”: radiologists, cardiologists and ophthalmologists. According to government data, their compensation soared between1991/ 92 and 2015/16.
When relativity is addressed, these three medical specialties stand to lose compensation to their lower-paid peers, including geriatricians, pediatricians, infectious disease specialists and psychiatrists. In what appears to be an effort to head off that eventuality, physicians from the Big Three have been trying to break away from the OMA so they can negotiate their own contract with government.