Quebec Education Minister Yves Bolduc is asking provincial health authorities to act speedily in reviewing a $215,000 bonus he was given for taking on patients as a family doctor.
Bolduc made the request to the RAMQ Medicare authority late Monday afternoon, after they announced their intention to review bonuses given to 20 doctors.
“I have the firm intention to proceed with total transparency in this file,” said Bolduc in a press release. “That’s why I am asking the RAMQ to proceed with its usual verifications concerning my medical practice and compensation in an exceptionally fast manner.”
Bolduc wants to know if he’ll have to repay part of all of a $215,000 bonus he received for taking on 1,500 patients for a brief 12-month period, around the minimum requirement for receiving the bonus.
In a heavily-attended press conference late Tuesday morning Bolduc stressed that he worked very long hours in his double duty as MNA and practicing physician.
“I'm not greedy; I'm hard working. The difference is when I work, I charge like all doctors but I worked 15 hours a day,” he said. “Do you know a lot of doctors who work every weekend?”
He calculated, however, that he might be asked to refund somewhere between $40,000 to $60,000 of the bonus and said that he would comply with whatever the RAMQ deems fair.
The bonus system was created under Bolduc himself when he served as health minister, signing a deal in 2010 in Quebec Family Doctors to allow them to see more patients in off-hours.
Bolduc said he stuck to the rules and received 30 per cent premiums for working weekends.
“It's not my fault doctors get 30 per cent for working on weekends,” he said.
The deal has worked, said Dr. Louis Godin, president of Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec, but said Bolduc is a special case.
“The fact that he practiced the medicine at the same time as being a deputy at the National Assembly, it's his choice,” said Godin.
On Monday, fellow former Liberal Health Minister Claude Castonguay demanded that Bolduc quit over the affair.
RAMQ representative Marc Lortie announced that many such bonuses would be reviewed but was unable to say what amount might be reclaimed from doctors deemed to have been overcompensated. Lortie said that 20 doctors are being investigated but that number could change.
Bolduc has been under fire from the opposition Parti Quebecois during the affair.
"We need a profound review of the compensation system for doctors," Diane Lamarre, PQ health critic said in a televised interview with the TVA network Tuesday.
York University political scientist Bruce Hicks said Premier Philippe Couillard should reprimand Bolduc because all those patients he took on ended up without a doctor again
“The reason he introduced this law was to get people off the waiting list and he knew full well that once the minority government fell he could very well be putting them back on the waiting list,” he said.
According to Health Ministry figures, the RAMQ distributed $16 million between November 2011 and June 2012 under the bonus system, about $4 million more than they had projected. From June 2012 to May 2014 the total rose to $34.5 million, $1.9 million more than planned. In June 2013 a threshold of 150 patients without family doctors per year was imposed on doctors who must meet with a patient before receiving a bonus of between $100 to $200 per patient, depending on the gravity of the illness. The recurrent financing was foreseen to cost $24.3 million when the program began in June 2013.
-With files from The Canadian Press
