Family doctors refuse to enforce parts of Quebec’s new health-care law

Family-medicine directors across Quebec say they won’t enforce major provisions of Bill 2, warning it will overwhelm clinics.

Opposition to Quebec’s new health-care law is growing, with the heads of all the province’s regional family-medicine departments saying they won’t enforce parts of Bill 2, which changes how doctors are paid and adds penalties tied to patient volumes.

Their stance was made public Tuesday in a joint letter sent to the premier and the province’s top health-care authorities.

At the GMF Santé Kildare in Côte Saint-Luc, QR codes now connect patients to an online petition opposing Bill 2.

Dr. Michael Kalin said it was a last-ditch effort to push the government to repeal the law. The clinic is one of 40 that say the new legislation will force them to shut down.

“You can’t ask a system that’s overloaded to see more patients. We’re saturated,” Kalin said.

In the letter, the family-medicine directors outline the provisions they won’t enforce — including assigning 1.5 million unattached patients to already overburdened clinics, and monitoring, controlling or disciplining colleagues who don’t take on enough patients.

Dr. Ariane Murray, the Montreal Regional family medical director, said connecting patients to clinics that can’t accommodate them will only solve the problem on paper.

We cannot imagine having to impose more patients on our colleagues when they are already completely overwhelmed with the workload they already have to do right now,” she said.

Moreover, Murray said surveilling doctors will only cause more to leave, which is something the province can’t afford.

“If we transform our job as being the controllers of the government, honestly, there are not many amongst us that are going to want to continue doing that job,” she said.

However, Health Minister Christian Dube is standing by the law and questions how it has been interpreted.

“The way the law was designed there’s a 60-day period and I think some people will start to realize they had some information that was not correct,” he said.

But Kalin said he has read the law, and he’s grateful that more voices, higher up, are standing alongside him against it.

“I’m very encouraged. I feel supported and it’s time for us to make a strong voice saying this law will not work and we cannot enforce it,” he noted.