Kingston, Ont. doctor fighting OHIP clawback of $660K in pandemic vaccination payments

A Kingston doctor is in a fight with the Ontario Ministry of Health as the ministry tries to claw back more than $600,000 in Ontario Health Insurance (OHIP) payments.

What is the reason for this?

The Ministry of Health claims that during the peak of the Corona epidemic, the doctor issued a wrong bill for the vaccination of thousands of people against Kovid-19.

But what is the story?

Dr. Elena Ma tells CTV Ottawa that she did nothing wrong and worries about the impact this decision will have on doctors like her in the future.

During the pandemic, Dr. Elena Ma set up physician-led mobile vaccination clinics in Kingston that delivered thousands of vaccines.

"I used medical students, other doctors and medical assistants," he said. "However, because of the conditions we were doing at the time, Ontario Health Insurance (OHIP) said it was not acceptable."

The Ministry of Health disagrees with our doctor for two reasons:

Using medical students to help with vaccinations
** Do this in the parking lot
"Ontario Health Insurance (OHIP) defines a physician's office as an office owned or leased by a physician," says the Ministry of Health in a 2023 letter to Our Doctor. Therefore, the agreement to use these parking lots does not meet the definition of "doctor's office". Therefore, our doctor has not proven that the vaccines were administered in his office."

Ontario Health Insurance has asked our doctor to pay back more than $600,000.

"I'm still a little bit in shock that it's gotten this far," Dr. Ma told CTV Ottawa. We were asked to do this. "We were told to do it quickly."

"No other doctor in the province who has held a mass vaccination clinic has had this problem," health minister spokeswoman Sylvia Jones told CTV Ottawa in a statement.

He continued: "This doctor billed the ministry for over 23,000 vaccines in five days, wrongly billed the ministry for $630,000, 21 times his authorized payments, and recruited Queen's medical students as volunteers for "The injection of the vaccine has been used, which is an abuse of the billing code."

The health minister's spokesperson also points out that "the ministry is investigating an allegation that the doctor paid 20 percent of the total amount to the volunteers and took the rest for himself."

Dr. Piotr Oglaza, Public Health Officer for the Kingston, Frontenac, Lancs and Addington Health Unit is supporting our doctor in this dispute with Ontario Health Insurance.

"I think professionally (the clinics) prevented thousands of hospitalizations, prevented deaths and were really critical to the well-being of this community by providing these vaccines at that critical time before the Omicron outbreak," he said. »

Dr. Elena Ma administers a vaccine at a mobile Covid-19 vaccine clinic at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario, on Sunday, Jan. 2, 2022.

Our doctor has been fighting an Ontario Health Insurance claim for two years. He says that the vaccinations were not done in days, but in clinics over months. He says he has injected many doses himself.

He has attended hearings with regulators and insists that all Ontario health insurance billing rules are being followed.

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