Devastating report: not a question of changing the mode of remuneration of physicians, said Couillard

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Charles Lecavalier

Wednesday, march 7, 2018 10:16

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Wednesday, march 7, 2018 10:25

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PARIS – Philippe Couillard has no intention to change the mode of remuneration of physicians, despite a report that reveals a significant decline in the productivity of the medical class for the past 10 years.

• READ ALSO: Rising wages and declining productivity: better-paid doctors in Quebec work less

“The payment from the act, despite all its faults, makes it so that people has an interest to see more patients. Then, if we change the mode of compensation to remove an incentive to see more patients, it will exacerbate the phenomenon that you just talk to me”, launched by the prime minister on Wednesday, in the margin of a mission in France.
 
He indicated that the mode of payment of doctors, anyway, it is “mixed” and not just based on the medical acts.
 
A devastating report commissioned by the health Commissioner – now abolished by the government Couillard – reveals that, over the last 10 years, the number of visits to family doctors decreased by 17 %, and 12% for specialists. The meteoric rise of remuneration of physicians of Quebec, for the past 10 years, has therefore resulted in a significant decrease in productivity.
 
For researchers, the mode of remuneration based on the remuneration in the act is at the heart of the problem. The number of days worked is also falling, by 4.5% in general practitioners, and 3.1 % among their colleagues.
 
“We managed, between 2006 and 2015, to double the money we have invested in the remuneration of the doctors, without an increase in the volume of services,” said one of the researchers who led the study, Damien Contandriopoulos, in an interview with The Newspaper.
 
Mr. Couillard, however, has minimized the scope of the study, indicating that this phenomenon was already known. “It is the same phenomenon. If you look at articles in 2002, 2003, 2004, it was always named this phenomenon in Quebec”, he said.
 
Mr. Couillard was also pleased to have quickly adopted legislative documents, such as law 20, which “imposes obligations on productivity the doctors that we had never obtained so far.”
 
Payments from the Régie de l’assurance-maladie du Québec to physicians rose from $ 3.3 billion in 2006 to 6.6 billion in 2015. Philippe Couillard believes that this increase has allowed “to come to a fair remuneration for physicians”, who wanted to obtain parity between their pay and that of their colleagues from Ontario.
 
It is forbidden to have fostered the doctors in suspending the articles in the most biting of the act 20. “For medical specialists, the only provisions which are for the time being delayed are those on the time of consultation of doctor,” he said.