Blurred Lines

In fact, the extra costs of private care soon add up: facility fees, extra billing for upgraded services, and additional layers of bureaucracy and administration associated with contracted procedures.37 There are also costs to the public system to rectify botched or inadequate private procedures,38 and to accommodate the delivery of private services in the event of closure or bankruptcy.39 For the [...] The list of covered services can, and does, change according to the whim of politics and the pressures of finance, as well as the evolving nature of medical procedures. [...] As with the CHA, the AHCIP: Expressly prohibits extra-billing and the charging of other fees in respect of insured services by physicians and dentists who are “opted-in” to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan; and [d]eems physicians and dentists to be opted-in to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan and discourages “opting out” by: requiring physicians to publicly do so for all purposes; proh [...] However, the 2005 ruling opened the door to similar challenges across Canada, encouraged the increased proliferation of private-pay clinics and surgical facilities,65 and instigated the ongoing controversy over auxiliary fees and user fees in Quebec.66 The Day case was brought in response to attempts by the BC Ministry of Health to conduct an audit of Dr. [...] From the FOI files, however, we learn that the audits of the three clinics in question were carried out by the Monitoring and Investigations Branch of Alberta Health, and the team that appears to have performed all of the audits was led by Richard Taylor, then head of the branch.