John F. Kennedy once recalled an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Kennedy is said to have made the comment following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

In the case of the humiliating defeat suffered by Ontario’s doctors in February 2015 when Premier Kathleen Wynne and Treasury Board President Deb Matthews unilaterally made regulatory changes to the fee schedule — thanks in part to a side deal the Ontario Medical Association naively agreed to in 2012, giving the Liberals the right to impose a contract on doctors if an agreement couldn’t be reached — there was but one party responsible for this fiasco: the OMA itself.

While that may sound a little harsh — or even worse, like sour grapes coming from someone who worked for the OMA in the late ‘90s — the reality is the seeds for this disaster were planted back in 1991, when Bob Rae’s NDP government brought in legislation allowing the OMA to apply the Rand formula to Ontario doctors, forcing all of them to pay dues to the association whether they wanted to be a member or not.

Incredibly, the Ontario Medical Association Dues Act was negotiated by the OMA and the Rae government in lieu of giving doctors a fee increase.

As a result of this bit of political skullduggery, the OMA rakes in between $50 million and $60 million in annual dues from the province’s 28,000 doctors, while the government gets a pliable lap dog.

To say this is a conflict of interest is stating the obvious. How can you seriously negotiate a contract with someone whose legislative largesse is mostly responsible for your survival? Only a fool would expect a dog to bite the hand that feeds it well and often.

To be fair, some good things did come out of this relationship. For the past 15 years or so, the OMA has been able to partner with the government to co-manage our health-care system. Hundreds of thousands of Ontarians have been able to find a family doctor and wait times have been reduced in targeted areas, such as hip replacement, cataract surgery, CT scans and MRIs. It would not be a stretch to suggest the OMA and the Liberals saved family medicine a decade ago by introducing the “alphabet soup” funding models — FHGs, FHNs and FHOs.

Of course, all this was before Dalton McGuinty and his band of merry men and women flushed billions of dollars down the toilet on one misadventure after another, and the global economy went south in 2008.

When then health minister Deb Matthews sat down with the OMA in 2011, she made it clear her ministry wouldn’t even consider negotiating with the doctors until they were able to identify $1 billion in savings. The OMA thought she was kidding. It was the first of their many miscalculations.

By the time the dust had cleared, the physicians’ representative had been humbled, and the table was set for what came next.

It’s now been a little over six months since the government imposed its will on the doctors of Ontario, leaving the OMA disenfranchised and on the outside looking in. Current Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins has been hard at work portraying this to the media as a victory for the province’s 11 million patients. But the price for bringing the OMA and its members to their knees is beginning to be felt.

As a result of the Liberals’ decision to go it alone, all those joint OMA-government committees have gone into hibernation and utilization of health-care resources is rumoured to be running somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent over the “hard cap” set by the government.

To make matters worse, my sources tell me the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care is refusing to share the data with the OMA, as it’s worried the OMA would tell its members to slow down and stop working so hard — which naturally would lead to a public outcry among patients and, more importantly, voters.

But just as the chickens always come home to roost, there will be a price to pay, starting next April, for what Wynne and Matthews have done. In addition to the 3.15% in cuts to the fee schedule foisted on the medical profession as a result of the 2011 deal and this year’s imposed contract, the government will enforce clawbacks on the province’s doctors when the fiscal year ends on March 31, 2016, if total billings go above a cap.

No one can say, at this point, just how much money will be clawed back from those we depend upon to diagnose and treat us.

But one thing’s for sure, it will get ugly. Doctors will start to look for friendlier jurisdictions. Others will look for alternative, non-OHIP sources of income. Still others will retire.

All of which begs the question: Is the OMA ever going to get its act together and start standing up for its members and acting like a real union? Can you honestly imagine teachers, cops, firefighters, or other government employees having their wages clawed back to the tune of 10 to 20 per cent every year for the next three years?

Didn’t think so.

Stephen Skyvington is president of PoliTrain Inc., former manager of government relations for the Ontario Medical Association, and currently an adviser to DoctorsOntario, a grassroots physicians organization.

Twitter @SSkyvington