Article content continued

The government is playing hardball in its attempt to curb a deficit estimated to be $8.5 billion this year. It has decided that total payments to doctors will go up 1.25 per cent this year, an amount that will not even cover increased patient demand. Instead, doctors are being forced to absorb part of that cost.

As fundamentally unreasonable as that position is, the government is sitting pretty. Its primary talking point is that doctors are well paid, with an income of $358,000 a year. As the government well knows, that is not take home pay, but gross billings before deducting all the costs of practice. More importantly, the government also knows that people are not terribly perturbed to see a reduction in pay for people who make more than they do.

The government wants to make it clear that the breakdown in talks with the OMA is not its fault. The province says it is ready to resume negotiations at any time. Tellingly, the government hasn’t jumped on the doctors’ offer to take the whole mess to binding arbitration. It’s no surprise why. Arbitrators tend to seek balance and some kind of fairness for both sides.

As it stands now, the government can impose any cuts it likes on doctors and blame them for not negotiating a deal. Politically, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Some might think the cuts to doctors’ fees are a modest salary trim for highly-paid people, but that ignores the reality of running a medical practice. Doctors aren’t government employees, they are business people. They face annual inflationary increases in the cost of operating their practices, things like electricity costs, staff salaries and rent. At the same time, the fee cuts reduce their revenue.