Liberal health critic Adil Shamji said there is a “significant power imbalance” between doctors and patients that can lead to people accepting doctors’ recommendations for certain procedures or special lenses without fully realizing the additional cost.
“In a medical environment, doctors have access to all kinds of information that patients do not,” Shamji, a doctor himself, wrote in a statement.
“When you mix that with pressure from shareholders and their incentive to maximize profits, you get patients feeling pressured to receive uninsured services without their truly informed consent.”
The NDP, Liberals and Green Party have all raised concerns that the government’s expansion of allowing private clinics to perform publicly funded procedures will only increase patients’ vulnerability.
The Progressive Conservative government is preparing for the next step in its expansion of the number of private clinics offering publicly funded tests and procedures such as cataract surgeries and MRIs, as well as adding hip and knee-replacement surgeries.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones has said the expansion will allow more procedures to be performed and will reduce wait times, and patients will never have to pay out of pocket for OHIP-insured services.
Her spokesperson said that the law enabling this expansion also brings the new clinics under patient ombudsman oversight and ensures access to publicly funded services can’t be conditional on the patient agreeing to an additional, uninsured service. Accreditation Canada has been selected to develop an enhanced oversight and quality assurance program for those clinics.
The government provided the amounts reimbursed over several years to patients who complained under the Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act. Between 2019-20 and 2021-22 those amounts were approximately $21,790, $3,527 and $18,723.
Many of those complaints involved clinics, but others included hospitals and laboratories.
There are currently more than 900 private health facilities in the province, largely providing diagnostic imaging services.
