She helped thousands get COVID-19 shots. Now she's on the hook for $600K

A Kingston, Ont., doctor celebrated for organizing drive-thru vaccination clinics that helped thousands get shots at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic is now being ordered to pay back more than $600,000 in fees for those same services.

Dr. Elaine Ma said she organized 45 mass vaccination clinics that administered roughly 35,000 doses between April 2021 and the following February.

Her work was recognized by the Ontario College of Family Physicians, which granted her its Award of Excellence in 2021, in part pointing to Ma's role in boosting local vaccination rates.

About a year later, the doctor said she received notice from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) seeking to recoup the money she had billed for the shots — approximately $600,000, plus around $35,000 in interest.

"I was shocked that OHIP chose to do this and chose to not look at the big picture here, which is, we saved lives," said Ma, adding that although only a few years have passed, people already seem to be forgetting what life was like amid the first waves of COVID-19.

At the time, Premier Doug Ford and retired general Rick Hillier, who was overseeing Ontario's vaccine rollout, were urging people to get their shots, Ma recalled.

"We answered the call to arms. We did it on good faith. We did it because people would end up in ICUs — or worse, dead — if they weren't vaccinated," said Ma, whose story was first reported by local news outlet Kingstonist.

It's a situation the president of the Ontario Medical Association said rewards a "heroic effort" with rigid bureaucracy. Kingston's medical officer of health believes it could have a "catastrophic" chilling effect on ingenuity the next time the province asks physicians for help responding to an emergency.

No one is disputing that Ma set up the clinics and doled out tens of thousands of doses, but the doctor said OHIP is arguing she was not allowed to delegate tasks outside the four walls of her office without written approval, based on a bulletin issued 20 years earlier.

A copy of the document, obtained by Radio-Canada, also states that as of April 2001, the person carrying out a procedure must be an employee.

That means the use of medical students from Queen's University to provide inoculations was a "misuse of the billing code" Ma relied on, according to a spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones.

In a statement to CBC, Hannah Jensen wrote that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a ministerial order was issued offering an hourly rate for all insured services at assessment centres, including vaccinations.

Doctors could also bill existing fees for vaccines given in their offices if they or their staff administered the shots, but if that order wasn't followed correctly, physicians would need to return the fees they "improperly" collected, she stated.

"No other doctor in the province who ran a mass vaccination clinic is having this issue," Jensen wrote in an email, when asked about the situation faced by Ma.