Saturday, April 7, 2018

WYNNE WON'T FIX HEALTHCARE, BUT WILL FIGHT WITH DOCTORS

   New Ontario Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Helena Jaczek instead took a page out of former Health Minister Eric Hoskins' playbook and once again seemed to mislead Ontarians about physicians' income. She, like Hoskins, claimed the average doctor billed Ontario $348,000 annually — but did so without accounting for overhead — and also claimed that a handful of specialists billed over $1 million a year — again, without accounting for overhead. For some specialties, overhead can be extremely high.
    While she tossed in a statement about the "good, important work" physicians do, noticeable by its absence was any commitment to try to work co-operatively with physicians in the future. Further, when opposition Health Critic Jeff Yurek asked her why the government wasn't working with physicians, she replied that the OMA was only speaking out because of contract negotiations.
   The strategy seems to be to continue to vilify physicians publicly by insinuating that they are only interested in their pocketbooks. They must hope that this will be enough to distract people from wondering why patients with mental illness have wait for five days in a hallway before getting the care they need.
    All of which makes me wonder: are the Liberals just plain unable to learn from their mistakes? Or have they simply given up on every trying to work co-operatively with Ontario's physicians?

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