The Ontario government has gotten into another donnybrook with private clinics for a second time in less than a year. Over the summer, they got into a messy dispute with private physiotherapy clinics. The government stopped 94 physiotherapy clinics from directly billing OHIP. Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews said that, over the years, licences to provide these services have been bought up by large corporations. Moreover, she charged, the " existing 94 clinics have had an unlimited ability to bill the government and have become very creative in they way they bill." The government claimed that an audit of 15,000 records from the clinics found that 58% of them failed to support OHIP billings. Five-minute exercise classes were sometimes billed as physiotherapy, care plans did not measure up, record keeping was incomplete, and physician referrals were sometimes lacking. “There is extraordinary growth in expenditures and the audit was one of those factors
Notes from Leftwords -- Doug Allan