By Amelia Hamilton
Ontario’s healthcare system is crumbling and it’s not accidental or pure incompetence. The government is breaking our system and remaking our healthcare needs into a profit opportunity for corporations, rather than building a universal public service that meets the needs of the people.
The Ontario government is using a standard privatization playbook:
Step 1: Defund it. Over the next 3 years the Ford government is predicting only a 0.7 percent yearly increase in healthcare funding, while the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO) says at least a 4 percent increase yearly is needed to maintain our already inadequate system.
The Result: Communities will lose more healthcare services. There will be more out of pocket expenses and even fewer hospital beds. Currently, Ontario has about 2.3 beds per 1000 people, well below the OECD average of 4.8. If the Ford government stays the course, we will go down to about 2 beds per 1000. This means that workers will lose their jobs. It also means that, tragically, people will lose their lives; this is what happened to Finlay van der Werken, who died in February 2024 at age 16 years, after waiting for eight hours in hospital emergency.
Step 2: Mismanage it. The Ontario Auditor General (OAG) revealed in a recent report that 1.4 billion in personal protective equipment has simply been written off. Supply Ontario has been purchasing supplies that do not meet quality standards, so cannot be used in coordination with healthcare facilities. They just sit there and expire.
There’s no working plan to get every Ontarian a primary care physician either, according to the OAG. Health Care Connect is a failure, because we don’t have enough family doctors in Ontario and municipalities are left trying to bribe as many doctors as they can to practice in their cities and towns. The government has opened more medical academic spaces, but they don’t have enough placements to be able to graduate enough family doctors to keep up with the needs of Ontarians.
The Result: Staff will experience higher levels of burnout and even more money and resources will be wasted. We won’t be able to train or keep enough doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals in Ontario. Also, it has the potential to cause despair and desperation among working people, so they are more likely to go along with Step 3.
Step 3: Privatize it. As our various healthcare institutions are defunded and mishandled, the once publicly owned services are then opened up to the private sector. Taking advantage of nurse and doctor shortages, private staffing companies charge up to three times the rate for hospital nurses rather than hospitals hiring permanent staff.
And all those healthcare services your doctor’s office used to do, such as taking blood? Now they’re done by multinational corporations like Dyna Care and LifeLabs. The government is also privatizing other healthcare services including surgery.
Another way to turn healthcare into profit is to up-sell additional services and upgrades not covered by the public system – services like lens upgrades for cataract surgery. Imagine seniors getting surgery for their eyes, then billed a few thousand dollars extra because no one warned them about the additional cost.
The Result: Privatization offers plenty of opportunities for fraud and funnels money into owners’ pockets, while the public gets inadequate care.
The Answer: We need fully funded healthcare. And it needs to be public, because if profit is the motive rather than human need, these issues will not be solved. Healthcare and other human services require real needs-based planning. We need equipment acquisition and storage to be seamlessly integrated to meet the needs of healthcare facilities.
We need long term planning based on publicly funded research, and all public services should be administrated in collaboration with each other. This can be done. Knowledge and technology can make it happen in the right hands – working class hands.
To fight back against the privatization, remind the people in your family and community that they will inevitably require healthcare services.
Unionized? Make healthcare a bigger political issue in your union.
Organize before healthcare crumbles apart completely.
For more information on Ontario’s disintegrating healthcare system and to get involved, visit the Ontario Health Coalition site.
[Photo: SEIU]
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