Dr. Jack Carr Report on tPSA

August 11, 2016

DR. JACK CARR’S ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE TENTATIVE PSA RELEASED

The Ontario Coalition of Doctors today released an update on their campaign to stop the OMA’s draft PSA, and to release a hard hitting independent economic analysis of the PSA done by Prof. Jack Carr. Following a series of untrustworthy decisions by the OMA including breaking their promise not to pursue a deal without binding arbitration, trying to ram the deal through in the middle of summer vacation and orchestrating a process the Ontario Superior Court of Justice called “sneaky”, the Coalition of Ontario Doctors sought independent third party analysis of the draft PSA. An independent economic analysis was conducted by Dr. Jack L. Carr, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Toronto. “The draft PSA is unlike any other labour agreements in the province. Would teachers ever sign an agreement with the government which states that if the growth in student population is above expectations, teachers would be required to take across the board pay cuts to finance the unexpected increased enrollment? Would the government ever ask the teachers to sign such an agreement? The TPSA is a unique labour agreement and means cuts in physician payments will negatively impact patient accessibility,” Dr. Carr said.

Key findings of The Carr Report include:

The draft PSA ignores the effects of inflation making it more likely of cuts beyond the $200 million cuts locked into the deal.
Doctors will be forced to assume financial responsibility for increased usage in the system, including costs like population growth and aging that they have no control over. This downloads the responsibility for increased usage from the government to already busy frontline physicians.
The draft PSA does not guarantee a period of stability and will in fact negatively impact patient accessibility.