LETTER: Ontario’s new business endeavour – privatizing our hospitals

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The soon-to-be passed Your Health Act will legislate the public funding of private-for profit clinics and expand the delivery of for-profit health care in Ontario. Surgeries and diagnostics have already begun moving out of public hospitals and into for-profit clinics.

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While pro-privatization doctors and their business interests are praising the privatization agenda of the Ontario government, many health-care advocates believe that private-for-profit clinics are not in the best interests of Ontarians, and especially not of seniors, many of whom are on fixed incomes.

The Ontario government maintains that there is a need to reform Ontario’s health-care system. Certainly, there is a need for improvement. But Ontario funds its hospitals at the lowest rate in Canada. As a result of government policy, we have the fewest hospital beds per capita of any province. The Ontario government has chosen to direct funding to private, for-profit clinics even though our public hospitals have operating rooms closed or underused because they don’t have the funding or staff to run them.

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Last year, the Ontario government underspent on health care by almost one billion dollars. According to the February, 2023 report of Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office, “There’s enough money in the overall spending plan for the government to top up health by $5 billion and education by a billion should they choose.”

A concern of the financial accountability officer is that the government contingency fund has grown from the traditional $1 billion to $3.5 billion. This is while the public health-care system is in crisis and in need of funding.

Instead of directing funding into the public system, the Ford government doubled the funding for for-profit clinics in the last quarter of the last fiscal year. The government refuses to repeal Bill 124 that restricts the wages of nurses even though the Ontario Superior Court ruled the bill unconstitutional and a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As RTOERO has pointed out, the repeal of Bill 124 that suppresses the wages of nurses would go a long way towards increasing staffing levels and easing wait times.

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Health Minister Sylvia Jones has described the provision of health care under the Your Health Act as a business model. RTOERO’s white paper on geriatric health care articulates that operating health care as a business fails many Canadian seniors.

Critics of the Your Health Act maintain that it will not address the health-care staffing crisis, shorten wait times or stop emergency rooms from closing. Rural and northern communities may be especially hit hard by the effects of privatization since for-profit clinics tend to be located in more lucrative locations. Smaller communities, such as ours, may be left with only underfunded, under resourced public hospitals.

Many communities across Ontario, including our own, dedicated countess hours and raised millions of dollars to build local hospitals. Soon after OHIP was established, Ontario passed legislation to ban any new for-profit hospitals. The Government’s present about-face in its steadfast resolve to privatize our public hospital services trivializes the earnest efforts of so many Ontarians to build local public hospitals with improved services and access for all.

Millions of dollars of public money are now being used to subsidize privatized for-profit healthcare. That money could go a long way to solve the crisis in our public hospitals.

Marie DellaVedova

political advocacy representative, District 3 Algoma, RTOERO