Monthly Archives: March 2018
Fee-for-service dispute
Posted on March 6, 2018 by admin
The government only pays doctors who paid fee-for-service (FFS) and who bill the government for a medically necessary physician or hospital service for that services. Therefore, patients are not involved in paying for that Fee-for-service. In general, FFS encourages doctors to move patients through quickly, which can decrease the quality of care, especially for sicker patients. For a better quality health care, some patients are willing to pay an out-of-pocket for FFS. So saying that patients decide to pay out-of-pocket for a service offered by an FFS doctor for better quality service, they choose the fully private clinics. The fully private clinics which provide private delivery and private payment (i.e., payment from patients, not government) are not allowed to bill the public plan unless they would take 100% of the payment from the government (i.e., not extra bill patients on top of the government payment) because extra billing is against the law under the universal public insurance plans in each province. However, this situation is confusing who is paying the doctor that FFS because that the public insurance covers the medically necessary physician or hospital service for the services is also ascribed to the Canada Health Act. Likewise, I believe what the most fully private clinics want is to take the government payment and bill the patients on top of that. The same thing also applies to doctors who are paid under capitation by the government, because there is no patient payment involved in capitation either. The capitation is the agreement that the government pays a set of an amount by enrolled patients assigned to them per period. The capitation does not just allow doctors to build better relationships with patients; capitation also frees doctors up to concentrate on the sicker patients because they get paid for all patients each month even if the patient doesn’t come in, it allows doctors to make money as crazy from the enrolled patients assigned to them.
By the way, I refer the doctors to GPs only…
