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Concern over Alberta private clinics

Less than one year after a private medical clinic opened in Calgary to angry protests, similar “members only” facilities are spreading across the province.

CALGARY — Less than one year after a private medical clinic opened in Calgary to angry protests, similar “members only” facilities are spreading across the province.

Critics say they’re taking physicians away from the public system, making it even harder for those who can’t afford thousands of dollars a year in membership fees to find a family doctor. But those running the clinics say they enable doctors to give their patients the care they deserve while operating fully within Canada’s medicare laws.

“It’s obviously extra billing and queue jumping,” says David Eggen, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “If this goes on unregulated, it’ll spread like wildfire and we can see it, even in a recession, starting to expand here in Alberta.”

Last September, protesters gathered as the Copeman Clinic opened in Calgary, saying they couldn’t afford up to $3,900 a year in fees.

Several other clinics have since opened or are in the works, including Provital Health and Wellness, which is to open next month in Calgary. Former patients of the family doctors who will work at that clinic received a letter asking them to join. The letter suggests that “with a lower patient-to-doctor ratio our team is capable of spending the time to provide you with better care and concern.” Attached is a fee schedule that puts cost for the first year at $3,500 and subsequent years at $3,000.

Copeman, which has several locations in British Columbia, has also said it will open an Edmonton clinic within months, says Eggen. Its website promises a location in Toronto in 2009, with other provinces to follow.

Many people have concerns about the spread of these clinics, says Irfan Dhalla, a Toronto physician with Canadian Doctors for Medicare.

“First and foremost, charging patients fees for access to medically necessary services undermines the key principles of medicare,” he says. “And if patients have to pay a fee to gain access to insured health services, then that’s illegal.”

It’s already hard to find a family physician in Canada, he says, and doctors at these clinics will see fewer patients in a day.

An audit by the B.C. Medical Services Commission into the Copeman Health Centre cleared it of any allegations that its membership fees violate the Canada Health Act. Alberta Health Minister Ron Liepert has also said it appears the clinics fall within acceptable legal guidelines.

Both Eggen and Dhalla say it’s hard to track clinics that charge membership fees, since they don’t have to register with the government and can quietly collect fees on the side. A report released last fall by the lobby group the Canadian Health Coalition estimated there were 16 “boutique physician clinics” across the country, although the number has almost certainly risen since then.

Gerard Boychuk, a political science professor at the University of Waterloo who wrote a recent report about Alberta and the Canada Health Act, says it would be difficult to prove that the clinics violate of the act. The part of the law which refers to user fees is very specific, he says.

Alberta was penalized in the 1990s for charging the public system for individual, medically necessary procedures and then charging people fees on top of that. For the membership fee to fall under that umbrella, someone would have to prove that they refused to pay the membership fee and were therefore refused medically necessary treatment.