opinion: why health privatization is bad medicine
i believe the quality of health care you get should not be determined by the size of your bank account.
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we are in a hospital staffing crisis.
people are waiting hours in the er, with more than one in ten not getting any care at all for more than eight long hours. people wait literally days on gurneys, or even on the floor, before they are admitted. devastating new data shows that in 2021-22, 1,417 ontarians died waiting for their operation.
ers are closing. i cannot imagine anything scarier than rushing a loved one to the hospital only to find the doors locked.
the cure chosen by premier doug ford and health minister sylvia jones is to shift some existing surgeries into private for-profit clinics.
we’re all going to pay for that — with a deeper staffing crisis in our hospitals, with longer waits, and with our wallets.
with for-profit health care you get a bill, even if the surgery is covered by ohip.
private for-profit health-care companies make their money by billing you for everything not covered by ohip. from the painkillers you take to a consultation with their physiotherapist — you’ll get a bill for all of it.
they upsell you, too. ohip covers lenses to repair your cataracts. but your surgeon may tell you they prefer to work with another brand — one not covered by ohip, that will set you back a few hundred bucks.
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all this extra billing already happens at ontario’s few independent health facilities, which were opened under privatization-hungry liberal and conservative governments.
i’m worried that families are going to feel pressured to pay. many who can’t afford it will pay. many will turn to credit cards and gofundme campaigns.
i think it’s wrong to ask people to rack up debt to get the surgery they need.
i believe the quality of health care you get should not be determined by the size of your bank account.
i believe you should get surgery when you need it, not when you can afford it.
with privatization, most of us will wait longer. and the hospital staffing crisis will get worse.
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the very same doctors, nurses and surgical teams that perform surgeries in private clinics perform the same and other surgeries in hospitals. ford’s plan to have those surgical teams spend more time in private clinics will take them away from hospitals.
hospital surgeries and other care will have to wait while those doctors and nurses are tied up performing less risky surgeries in clinics.
the wait for joint reconstructions, cancer surgeries and more will balloon. fewer surgeons and nurses will be at the ready for emergency surgeries.
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i believe people who can afford to pay for a minor surgery should not get to jump the queue ahead of a person in debilitating pain, or in crisis.
there’s a better solution.
ontario can give nurses and other health-care workers the pay and respect they deserve. ford can scrap bill 124, his legislation that holds back the wages of frontline health-care workers. nurses have said publicly time and again it’s the reason they’re leaving.
we can launch a plan to attract, hire, train and retain health-care workers. we need to offer wages and incentives that are as good as or better than other provinces, like quebec, where health-care workers can get up to $18,000 in incentives.
we can reinstate the practice-ready assessment program, which gets the most qualified internationally educated doctors and nurses working in our hospitals in just 12 weeks — a program ford scrapped in 2018.
and we can make nursing school free.
ford chose to underspend his own health-care budget for last year by $1.8 billion. he refused to adjust this year’s health-care budget to keep up with exploding inflation.
the conservative privatization push will make the crisis worse — costing us all far too much.
— peter tabuns is interim leader of the ndp and mpp for toronto-danforth
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