MD income up 29 per cent in 7 years: study

Newly released data show Ontario physicians continue to be the highest paid in Canada with earnings jumping 29 per cent in seven years to an average of $368,000.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins, who is engaged in a nasty dispute with the doctors over fee cuts, seized on the new numbers — released Tuesday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) — as evidence that the profession is fairly paid.

“I am proud as a government that in the last decade, Ontario has reinvested in our doctors . . . to the point where they are now, and still are, the highest paid physicians in this country,” he told reporters Tuesday.

The province is unilaterally cutting fees to doctors, represented by the Ontario Medical Association, by 1.3 per cent, effective Thursday. This is on top of 2.65-per-cent fee cut in February, which was also imposed unilaterally.

The OMA is threatening legal action and wants the dispute to go to binding arbitration.

Hoskins maintains the cuts he is seeking are modest. “It’s an issue of asking our physicians to accept slightly less for the services they provide,” said the minister, who wants to divert the monies into other health services such as home care.

The new CIHI data offers provincial comparisons for average gross clinical payments to physicians for 2013-14. The annual average payment to physicians that year was $336,000. Out of those earnings, doctors pay overhead expenses such as rent and staff salaries, an amount widely cited as about 30 per cent.

Meantime, the OMA is gearing up for what it describes as a “virtual day of action” on Thursday. It’s asking physicians, patients and supporters to sign up and give it time-limited access to their status updates on Twitter and Facebook so that at 2 p.m. it can send out a single message, en masse, to tell government to stop the cuts.

“It’s a way of using social media to send a message to Premier Wynne to let the government know that they need to put patients first and stop cutting funding to medical care,” said OMA president Dr. Michael Toth.