The loophole lives on: Ford gov’t votes down bill that would’ve banned NPs from privately charging patients

A private member’s bill that would have banned nurse practitioners from charging patients was voted down by the Ford government on Monday.Bill 203, also called the Keeping Primary Care Fair Act, was a two-part bill that proposed eliminating patient charges for services provided by nurse practitioners and called on the province to establish a framework to bring nurse practitioners-provided services into the publicly funded healthcare system.Since services provided by nurse practitioners are not mentioned in the Canada Health Act, some nurse practitioner-led clinics in Ontario have been charging patients upwards of $80 for a single appointment, or hundreds of dollars for annual membership fees. Ontario also has no remuneration system for services offered by self-employed nurse practitioners, which means nurse practitioner-led clinics are currently not able to directly bill the province.Read: ‘Loophole’: Should NP-led clinics that charge patients fees for care be allowed to continue? “There is a private, for-profit marketplace for patients desperate to find primary care, and nurse practitioners desperate to help them. As a result, patients are paying with their credit card instead of their OHIP card for medically necessary care,” Ontario Liberal MPP Dr. Adil Shamji, the sponsor of Bil 203, said in the legislature last week.“There’s a very simple solution: Give nurse practitioners the legitimacy they deserve. Embrace and fund them fully within Ontario’s health care system. Give them jobs. Give them the recognition they deserve. Give them the funding and give them to Ontarians. This is what my bill does,” Dr. Shamji continued.Health Minister Sylvia Jones has previously expressed opposition to fee-for-access primary care clinics, but the Ford government maintains it’s incumbent on the federal government to close the loophole. Last spring, Jones wrote a letter to federal Health Minister Mark Holland, asking the Trudeau government to prohibit the practice of non-physicians privately charging patients for primary care services.“We can’t have nurse practitioners leaving Ontario to go to Quebec or Manitoba. We need a Canada-wide solution, because that is what the minister of health has specifically communicated to the federal minister of health,” Anthony Leardi, parliamentary assistant to the minister of health, said in the legislature.Dr. Shamji disagrees and says Ontario can make this change without waiting on the feds.“The minister might tell you she is waiting for an interpretation letter regarding nurse practitioners from the Prime Minister’s office and that she can’t do anything without it. That is not true, and this bill proves that,” he said.

The loophole lives on: Ford gov’t votes down bill that would’ve banned NPs from privately charging patients

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