March 04, 2003 Volume 39 Issue 09

OPINIONS: EDITORIAL

OPED: Slap a snarl on your face! OMA-bashing time is near

It's that time again, when a growing number of Ontario doctors slap snarls on their faces to engage in one of their favourite pastimes—bashing the Ontario Medical Association. Not that the OMA hasn't historically fuelled the fire of discontent among some of its members, but the bellicose band does seem to be expanding.

The OMA's communications apparatus is rusty and it will take a lot of grease to get it whirring again. Things got so bad recently, and at such an historic moment, that the group's official response to the final report of the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada took four days to be released. By then, the media pack had moved on to fresher meat.

The association's general council, an enlightened group of 250 politicos from across the province, who've voted each time they've met since the early 1990s to exclude all media representatives from their sessions, is a decision- and policy-making machinery perennially stuck in neutral, one that seems particularly ineffective at handling critical issues.

Witness the decision to approve "for distribution only" a recent primary care reform template. Or its effectively secret vote to kill an effort to rationalize the province's antiquated fee schedule after resorting to multiple across-the-board disbursements of paltry fee increases over the years. Or its hill o' beans tinkering with a ludicrously draconian process of medical billing audits.

OMA members have become so widely disenchanted, it makes one almost feel sorry for the group's elected representatives and staff.

Almost, but not quite. Still, this round of OMA bashing is starting off early and has become nasty quickly, thanks to an up-to-now largely nebulous group called the Coalition of Family Physicians of Ontario. The OMA's four-year, $4-billion-plus deal with the province expires March 31, 2004, but the COFP is now engaged in intense activity that will likely be felt in a pair of key votes. One saw three coalition members stand for election to represent Toronto on the OMA board, the other will put forward a candidate from Ontario who will become president of the Canadian Medical Association and the profession's national spokesman in August 2004.

Senior COFP official Dr. Mike Goodwin, who practises in Niagara Falls, has trotted out the oft-heard complaint that the OMA has no legal right to represent all physicians in the province. This debate has continued on and off for several years.

In a recent letter to his local newspaper, he addresses the issue, saying the OMA has never asked permission to do so. Further, referring to billing audits, he wondered when governments were given the authority to scrutinize private citizens other than through the courts and Income Tax Act.

"It is now 20 years since we celebrated passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," he noted. "Maybe some day soon doctors can expect to enjoy the same civil liberties as other citizens."

Dr. Goodwin may be singing from a familiar songsheet, but if his persistence and that of the coalition is any measure, things are bound to heat up in the OMA kitchen in the months to come.—Matt Borsellino, national editor