After several years of court battles, reporter Theresa Boyle and the Star won the right to publish the fee-for-service billings for Ontario doctors. Health expenditures comprise more than 40 per cent of the Ontario budget, and spending on doctors’ billings approaches a quarter of health expenses — nearly 10 per cent of all provincial expenditures. As a former bureaucrat previously responsible for the physician budget, I can tell you that we are getting very good value for most categories of physician billing. As Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner Brian Beamish says, publication of physicians’ billings allows us all to ask questions about how the money is spent. And a small number of these pain doctors are practising something called “interventional pain medicine” in which they provide patients with multiple local anaesthetic nerve injections on a frequent basis.

Source: thestar November 29, 2019 18:56 UTC