BC doctors double dipping - Clinic doctors got $500,000 in public funds, but walk-ins were charged for basic visits in violation of Canadian law

From this Report. There is also a lot more information in The Tyee

Doctors working at the private Copeman Healthcare Centre in downtown Vancouver received nearly $500,000 in fees charged to the public last year, though the clinic is also charging its 1,500 patients to use its services.

The top grosser in public funds was Tasha Bienert, a family physician at the clinic, who got $158,727 from the Medical Services Plan.

Psychiatrist Kevin Kjernisted was paid $120,568.

Another psychiatrist, Diane McIntosh, received $118,079.

Corporate medical director Peter House made $43,110 while family physician Beth Donaldson got $39,466.

The payments are recorded in the Medical Services Commission's annual financial report for the year ended March 31, 2007. Two other Copeman clinic doctors, Michael Koehle and Mark Gelfer, do not appear in the records. Nor for that matter does clinic founder and CEO Don Copeman, a businessman who once took pre-medicine courses.

It is unclear from the report how much of the fees paid to the various Copeman doctors was for work performed at the clinic, and how much was for work they may have done elsewhere. But medical director House says, "Nobody at Copeman works outside the clinic. We used to."

Besides whatever public money flows to Copeman clinic staff, the centre also charges patients a fee before they can see a doctor. To be seen by a doctor costs $3,900 for the first year, plus $2,900 for each year after that. That's up, by the way, from $3,500 for the first year and $2,300 annually when The Tyee reported on the clinic in May 2006.

Under the Medicare Protection Act, doctors who have "opted-in" and receive payments under the public Medical Services Plan may not charge a patient for any service normally paid for through public insurance. How then, are Copeman doctors charging twice?

In late November the government's Medical Services Commission, which oversees payments under the MSP program, ruled after an 18-month investigation that the private clinic on Vancouver's Hornby Street is operating legally, but it remains unclear how that decision was made...