Alta. doc ordered to pay up to $32K after double billing patient and gov’t while charging $1,000 no-show fees

An Alberta physician is facing tens of thousands of dollars in monetary penalties for double-billing patients and the provincial health insurance plan, in addition to charging exorbitant missed appointment fees.A decision was reached last November, and the Hearing Tribunal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA) announced on June 4, 2026 that Dr. Bruce Hoffman’s billing practices constituted unprofessional conduct and ordered him to pay a fine of $20,000.According to the tribunal, the incidents of double billing took place on two separate occasions in 2016. Dr. Hoffman was found to have billed the Alberta Health Insurance Plan for these visits, while also charging the patient $750 and $500 for each visit, respectively. In his defence, Dr. Hoffman submitted that the double billing was for different services offered on the same visit. But while the tribunal agreed that there is no evidence that Dr. Hoffman had double billed for the same service, the issue here was that the tribunal could not differentiate on the patient chart which services were insured by the province and which were uninsured. This still constitutes a breach of section 9 of the Alberta Health Care Insurance Act and amounts to unprofessional conduct, the tribunal concluded.“If a physician elects to bill both Alberta Health Care Insurance and the patient for services provided during a single visit, the physician must clearly differentiate and identify in the patient record what clinical service is being provided and to which payer such a service is to be charged. Dr. Hoffman failed to do so,” the tribunal said.Another part of the complaint against Dr. Hoffman also centred around the $1,000 missed/cancelled appointment fee that he charged to the same patient in November 2016. The Canadian Medical Association’s code of ethics states that physicians may only charge “reasonable fees” for cancelled and missed appointments. Dr. Hoffman argued the fee was reasonable and that the patient was clearly informed about the cancellation policy in advance. But in this case, the patient only cancelled the appointment because Dr. Hoffman did not have all of her lab test results available at the promised time. Thus, the tribunal concluded that charging any amount for the cancelled appointment would have been unreasonable.In addition, Dr. Hoffman was also found to have breached the college’s standard of practice on record retention. He had sent the patient her medical records by courier, but the records were left unattended in an open mailbox.Finally, Dr. Hoffman is also facing sanctions for inappropriately using another corporation rather than his own professional medical corporation for his medical practice, in contravention of the Health Professionals Act. Evidence examined by the tribunal included billing statements and credit card charges to the patient that were in the name of the other corporation.“Dr. Hoffman’s use of a corporate entity which was not registered with CPSA in his medical practice is a serious offence as doing so creates a means where regulated members practice medicine outside of CPSA’s regulatory oversight and its ability to protect the public interest,” the tribunal said.As a result, the tribunal has ordered Dr. Hoffman to pay $7,000 in fines and 50% of the costs of the investigation up to $25,000. He will also be required to complete a course on privacy within four months and an ethics course within six months.This isn’t the first time Dr. Hoffman has gotten into trouble over double billing. In 2024, the CPSA tribunal ordered him to pay back more than $20,000 to the estate of a patient for also failing to delineate the line between insured and uninsured services.

Alta. doc ordered to pay up to $32K after double billing patient and gov’t while charging $1,000 no-show fees

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