By Bobbi Ann Brady
The Auditor General of Ontario, Shelley Spence, recently released her 2025 Annual Report. It’s a whopper of a report. It targeted primary care, OHIP billing; Supply Ontario: personal protective equipment (PPE) inventory management and much more than I can discuss here. My overall takeaway from the Annual Report was government spending still seems to be heading in the wrong directions instead of really making a positive difference in our lives.
Instead of going, say, toward more health care, the Report shows that money was squandered, for example, on massive personal protective equipment write-offs and OHIP overbilling. The media was all over it and multiple reports flagged the issues.
Speaking of flagging, it’s frustrating to read higher than 100 doctors over the past few years submitted claims for working 365 or 366 days a year. Am I missing something or is a year still 365 days? But I digress. And although I highly respect and value our doctors, I’m not sure it’s possible to work 365 days in a row in such a difficult and stressful role. Ms. Spence also cited cases when many physicians also billed for providing services to more than 500 patients in a single day and were not exposed to any post-payment scrutiny.
CTV News parsed through the Report and found examples of high-risk billing whereby no audit was conducted, such as the ophthalmologist who billed $6.7 million in 2023/24. That’s more than double the runner-up billing ophthalmologist. They also listed an unaudited billing situation when a diagnostic radiologist reported working 364 or more days each year starting at 2021/22 to 2023/24.
Ms. Spence’s Report highlights the Ontario health ministry’s limited ability to flag billings like those, which should have been flagged as high-risk. However, during pre-Budget consultations on December 5th in Peterborough, I learned from the Ontario Medical Association the OHIP billing system is outdated and antiquated. Real-time billing and an ombudsman to oversee could perhaps provide the cure to things like overbilling.
Pivoting over to the Auditor General’s assessment of the Ontario government’s management of personal protective equipment (PPE): News reports stated the province wrote off over one billion pieces of PPE, which rang in at $1.4 billion since 2021. You will remember at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario was well short of PPE. In response, the province created Supply Ontario in late 2020 to oversee the PPE inventory.
Unfortunately, Ms. Spence discovered Supply Ontario lacks a proper inventory management system to efficiently report costs but opts for an “inefficient manual process to report yearly.” To this day, despite vastly lower demand, Ontario keeps purchasing the same levels of PPE as during the apex of the pandemic. Obviously, I think Ontario should maintain a safe level of PPE, but the PPE example along with examples peppered throughout the Report indicate to me money is misdirected that could be used elsewhere to improve the quality of life for Ontarians.
There are so many places that money could go to better use, but how about toward health care and long-term care? For example, I recently asked why they are investing $2.1 billion to long-term care new builds while existing homes await expansion? Edgewater Gardens in Dunnville waits indefinitely for its planned 64-bed expansion due to a funding shortfall.
Long-term care segues nicely into health care and nurse practitioners (NPs). NPs and the Nurse Practitioners Association of Ontario has long advocated making their members a bigger part of the solution to the province’s doctor shortage. I’ve been reminding the government of this since my election in 2022. Perhaps the wayward funds Ms. Spence has discussed could be used to support nurse practitioners and help them to play a much bigger role in many aspects of health care. From long-term care homes to expanding primary care access, their use should match their abilities.
I guess I’m just frustrated when these auditor reports come out, and I think of the money that could really go to improving the lives of Ontarians.
Bobbi Ann Brady is the MPP for Haldimand-Norfolk