by medicaltechont | Jun 10, 2017 | Healthcare, private clinics
Rosalia Guthrie is still astounded that it cost her $4,350 to get her shoulder injury assessed by a surgeon who works in Canada’s public health-care system.
She had been waiting in agony for 16 months to see Dr. William Regan when she called his office, asking how much longer it would be. His secretary gave her the number of another clinic to call – so she did. That’s when Ms. Guthrie learned there was another way in to see the surgeon – with no lineup.
But it would cost her. “The woman there called me back … and gave me three [appointment] times … right away,” says Ms. Guthrie, 67, of Salmon Arm, B.C., who was told that she had reached Dr. Regan’s other, private clinic. “Then she said, ‘You have to pay.’”
Read more at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/doctors-extra-billing-private-clinics-investigation/article35260558/
by medicaltechont | Oct 17, 2016 | OHIP Billing, Ontario, Privacy, private clinics
TORONTO, ONTARIO–(Marketwired – Oct. 7, 2016) – This afternoon, the Wynne government has made public a formal invitation from the Health Minister to Ed Clark to “assess and validate the value these [health data, e-health records and related intellectual property and infrastructure] systems have created for Ontario and to recommend ways to take them to the next level”.
Read more at http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/coalition-warns-health-minister-privatization-ontarios-health-systems-patient-records-2164963.htm
by medicaltechont | Mar 5, 2016 | private clinics, United States
Governments across Canada have been caught in a fiscal bind over the entire period of neoliberalism. On the one hand, they have pursued austerity and restraint almost without interruption since the 1990s; and, on the other, they remain under pressure to deliver some minimal social security for welfare, healthcare, pensions and so forth. Since the eruption of the financial crisis in 2008 this contradiction, a core tension of meeting social needs in capitalist societies, has gotten worse. The combination of a long depression in economic growth and permanent austerity in government budgeting has further cramped government fiscal capacities. This has led to all kinds of efforts, following the new public management organization of the state, to privatize, contract-out, marketize and so on, government functions and services.
Read more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/canadas-struggle-against-the-privatization-of-healthcare/5508667
by medicaltechont | Dec 19, 2015 | private clinics, Technology
National Medicare Week has just passed, buoyed with optimism as a fresh-faced government takes the reins in Ottawa — elected partly on a promise of renewed federal leadership on health care. Yet these “sunny ways” are overcast by recent developments at the provincial level that entrench and legitimize two-tier care.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/colleen-m-flood/canadian-health-care_b_8813156.html
by medicaltechont | Nov 14, 2015 | Canada, e-Health, OHIP Billing, private clinics
The dispute between Ontario doctors and the province over billing rates is threatening access to methadone treatment, with two private Toronto clinics closing their doors and patients in some rural communities facing an uncertain future.
The threat to service follows a 1.3-per-cent rate reduction imposed by the province last month on all fee-for-service billings. The money-saving measures also included targeted reductions, among them a 50-per-cent cut to rates paid to doctors for urine tests that are done once a week or more frequently as part of methadone therapy used to treat heroin and other opioid addictions.
Now at least one Toronto doctor says the fee cut amounts to roughly 25 per cent of his total revenue and means his smaller clinics are losing money. First Nations leaders also are warning access in rural and Northern communities is in danger because private clinics – where most methadone treatment is given – are not as financially attractive. Others say this latest battle over money points to deeper problems with how methadone treatment is delivered in Ontario that go beyond the current billing battle.
Click here to read more.
by medicaltechont | Feb 7, 2015 | Canada, Healthcare, Hospitals, private clinics
The Supreme Court of Canada decision Friday to allow people with “grievous and irremediable medical conditions” to ask for doctor-assisted suicide should be just the start of a national conversation about end-of-life care in the country, doctors say.
“The Supreme Court has lit a fire under us,” Dr. James Downar, Co-Chair of the Physicians Advisory Council for Dying with Dignity, said in an interview.
“It’s time to talk, we can’t put it off any more.”
http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/health/doctor-assisted-death-physicians-want-more-palliative-care-as-well-1.2948265
The dispute between Ontario doctors and the province over billing rates is threatening access to methadone treatment, with two private Toronto clinics closing their doors and patients in some rural communities facing an uncertain future.