Wawa-news.com You can't hear the 'big picture'!
Halloween has just come and gone. One of my favourite holidays; I have always been a fan of the creativity on display this time of year. Whether it’s the elaborate decorations that people put up on their houses, the wonderful costumes that trick-or-treaters show up at my door, or even just the fantastic scary stories that come out in honour of the occasion.
When it comes to horror stories, I have always been a fan of the classics. One of my favourites is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In the story, Dr. Victor Frankenstein undertakes an ill-fated attempt to create new life by piecing together body parts he has stolen from a graveyard and subjecting them to a mysterious treatment, including bolts of lightning. In the end, he creates a monster that is shunned by the village people, who are aghast at Dr. Frankenstein’s work. Both the book and the many films inspired by it are great to get you in the Halloween spirit.
The legislature was sitting on Halloween this year, and one of the issues we discussed was the ongoing healthcare crisis and physician shortage in Ontario. Given the day and the messages delivered by doctors, my mind was drawn to the Frankenstein story. I realized that Premier Ford is creating his own ‘Frankenstein Monster’ with our public healthcare system. I know this thought may seem a little silly, but let me explain.
Since he took office in 2018, Premier Ford and his Health Ministers have been undertaking a project to strategically gut our public healthcare system. They are slowly bringing private healthcare companies into the mix. At the same time, they have done away with many local and community health services in favour of massive, centralized agencies.
This started in 2019 under Christine Elliott, who introduced the People’s Health Act, which centralized all of Ontario’s health services under one superagency called Ontario Health and removed protections to stop for-profit companies from carrying out hospital services. It was subsequently built upon by Minister Sylvia Jone’s Your Health Act, which allowed for-profit diagnostic and surgical clinics to bill OHIP for services.
By giving private companies access to public budgets, the actual privatization of our healthcare system is not obvious to the casual observer. On the outside, it looks like not much has changed in most ways. But when you peek at the inner workings, you will see that the system is now a patchwork of for-profit companies alongside the public healthcare system we are used to.
In practice, this takes on a few forms.
One example I just mentioned is allowing for-profit diagnostic and surgical clinics to take on patients and charge OHIP. This was touted as a method to alleviate the backlog; however, it has resulted in these clinics diverting dollars meant for our public system to increase their profit margins. In fact, in November of last year, CBC revealed that some for-profit clinics were being paid more than hospitals to perform the exact same surgeries. Around the same time, for-profit diagnostic clinics caught up-selling patients by adding non-OHIP covered fees to bills that those patients had to cover out-of-pocket.
Another example of this creeping privatization is Ontario’s growing reliance on hospitals and long-term care homes, especially in the North, to hire temporary staff through private agencies. This is an issue I hear about constantly from the leadership at hospitals and care homes in Algoma-Manitoulin. These for-profit staffing agencies charge double or even triple the average salary for a nurse or a PSW.
With the ongoing health human resources shortage, made worse by the Ford government’s wage cap legislation, hospitals in small communities like ours have no choice but to pay massive sums to these for-profit agencies to keep services at full capacity. That results in a larger and larger portion of their budgets being diverted into the pockets of shareholders instead of care.
A very recent example is seen among the issues that have come up with the new Ontario Health at Home agency created by the Convenient Care at Home Act or Bill 135.
Bill 135 amalgamated all the local home-care service agencies into one super agency called Ontario Health at Home. The minister assured Ontarians that doing this would create a better standard of care for home-care province-wide and create savings by contracting all purchasing bids through one agency.
Over the past month, what we have seen unfold has been the exact opposite. Since September, physicians across Ontario have described a “home-care collapse” as they have been unable to get necessary supplies to patients. Individuals inside the medical supply industry have pointed to Ontario Health at Home delivering the formulary too late and ordering insufficient quantities of supplies despite being told that they would not have enough. Coupled with the fact that, under the new system, these supplies must be available over huge geographic areas, it has taken up to 12 times the required timeframe to be delivered to the patients who need them. In some cases, supplies show up missing necessary components. In other cases, caregivers have had to buy their own medical supplies on their dime to ensure their loved ones do not go without care.
I hope readers can see the piecemeal monster that Premier Ford has created out of Ontario’s healthcare system. Fastening for-profit companies onto the non-profit public system in multiple unnecessary ways, taking all the local health services and mashing them together into behemoth agencies. And, much like Dr. Frankenstein, who stole the pieces for his monster in the night, the premier is moving his privatization agenda forward while hiding it from the public’s view.
But where Frankenstein’s Monster was a misunderstood and pitiable character, the premier’s healthcare monstrosity is causing chaos and suffering for Ontarians who cannot get timely access to medical care.
Privatizing and centralizing healthcare delivery in Ontario has been the mission of this government since day one. The premier and his ministers have tried to portray these steps as a necessary path to go down because our system was in such dire straits. However, the fact of the matter is that there were (and still are) other options that this Progressive Conservative government should pursue.
Ontarians must recognize what this government is doing to our healthcare system. If we allow the premier to continue to build his for-profit healthcare monster in secret, it is only a matter of time before it will permanently replace the public system we love and hold dear.
As always, I invite you to contact my office about these issues or any other provincial matters. You can reach my constituency office by email at [email protected] or call Toll-free 1-800-831-1899.
Michael Mantha, MPP
Algoma-Manitoulin
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