Auditor general flags $1.4B in wasted PPE, questionable doctor billings in Ontario

Ontario’s auditor general is pointing at massive spending waste by Premier Doug Ford’s government.

That includes questions about doctors asking to be paid for working more than 24-hours-a-day while the province’s health-care system is struggling.

The auditor general also said the government destroyed nearly $1.4 billion worth of face masks as the COVID-19 pandemic was winding down.

In a series of reports on government spending, auditor general Shelley Spence said she was shocked by what she found in doctor billing.

“It was just so glaring to me to see the potential of that kind of taxpayers’ money being spent in that way,” Spence said Tuesday in Queen’s Park.

Spence says auditors found “anomalies” in doctor billings that could cost between $400 and $665 million a year.

They include “physicians who billed for over 24 hours of services in a single day” or over 100 patients per day, or worked 365 days a year.

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She also focused on personal protective equipment like face masks.

“Over one billion PPE items valued at approximately $1.4 billion were written off,” Spence said.

The government says they were bought during the pandemic and didn’t meet current requirements. So they started incinerating them.

Spence also says about two million Ontarians — or nearly 12 per cent of the population — still don’t have primary health-care providers and the government’s Health Care Connect isn’t connecting enough people.

“Our audit found that the Ministry of Health and Ontario Health did not consistently have programs in place to plan or oversee initiatives to improve patients’ access to primary care providers,” Spence said.

The auditor general also looked at the government’s advertising, and said 38 per cent of it over a year, worth about $42 million, would not have passed her review.

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“Some of the ads are quite promotional for the governing party,” Spence said. “They aren’t really providing solid information for the people of Ontario.”

She said she also found what she called a “disregard for the public’s rights under the Environmental Bill of Rights” where the public isn’t getting the chance to speak out on huge projects.

In response, three government members stepped in front of the camera to say there’s really no problem here, like doctors billing for 24-hours-a-day in a complex system.

Anthony Leardi, parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health, was one of them.

“When a doctor is submitting for a billing code he or she might need to submit more than one billing code to cover a treatment which went to one patient so we need not automatically jump to an assumption with respect to that situation,” Leardi said.

But the opposition says the government is wasting millions.

The leader of Ontario’s Official Opposition, Marit Stiles, said the government is wasting millions.

“The real story here is about a wasteful, callous and out of control government,” she said.

John Fraser, Liberal house leader, expressed his frustration in parliament Tuesday.

“$112 million of money spent on ads that don’t solve a single problem,” Fraser said. “They exist solely to make the premier and his party look good – that money could have hired nurses, helped primary care, support for schools.”

The government says it has no regrets about destroying $1.4 billion worth of face masks.

The ministers said it was a scramble to get protective equipment during COVID-19 as some of it was substandard and they wouldn’t want to use it now.

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