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The Quebec government is ordering hospitals and other health facilities to slash $150 million from their budgets for medical tests, imaging scans and procedures to patients that it has judged are not “pertinent to care,” the Montreal Gazette has learned.

In total, the Health Department is aiming to chop $583 million in spending through so-called optimization measures. And in a bizarre twist, the government has decided that it won’t provide hospitals funding for next year’s leap year day, Feb. 29, which will fall on a Monday, saving it $64 million.

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It’s up to hospitals to cover the shortfall on that day out of their own already diminished budgets.

One of the biggest cutbacks will take place at the McGill University Health Centre, which last year was forced to cut $50 million from its operating budget. It must now reduce its spending by an extra $21 million.

Of all the “optimization measures,” the most controversial is compelling doctors to stop ordering tests that the government is now considering “unnecessary” in the context of fiscal austerity. Patient-rights advocates and managers in the health system are warning that this sets a dangerous precedent, opening the door to ageism and the prospect of clinicians no longer performing tests for people above a certain age.