Skip to main content

Ontario launches P3 extravaganza - as P3 hospitals teeter on brink of collapse


The stream of terrible news about public private partnerships (P3s) in the motherland of P3s just keeps on coming.  But no one seems to be paying attention in the Ontario government.     


Now 60 English hospitals are on the brink of collapse due to their P3 deals according to the British Health Secretary (like our Minister of Health) .  Here's commentary from the conservative British daily, the Telegraph on the latest P3 (or "PFI") fiasco:
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has revealed that hospital trusts are "on the brink of financial collapse" because of the "crippling" servicing costs they are paying to private companies which built infrastructure under Labour. Remarkably, it turns out that this method of providing big capital projects, beloved of Gordon Brown, is rather more expensive than simply borrowing money from the bond markets and using it to build a hospital. Of course, anyone should have been able to guess this: there is no way that private companies, whose borrowing costs are vastly higher than the Government's, would be able to provide capital projects for less money.
And yet despite this, even as Andrew Lansley attacks Labour's "sick debt crisis", he and his colleagues are signing up to yet more PFI. 
One might say the same of the Ontario government, which is now launching a P3 hospital scheme on a scale to rival the English (and bragging about it, to boot).  


The Telegraph also reports that there "is already evidence that waiting lists for non–urgent operations have begun to rise as hospitals delay treatment to save money."  The 60 hospitals care for 12 million patients.


The British Health Secretary, Lansley, has told The Telegraph that the hospitals will not be allowed to collapse.  But how this will be achieved remains unclear. 


Hospital and Department of Health officials will meet over the next few weeks to develop plans to deal with the crisis.  The Telegraph reports that their "proposals are expected to include significant cost–cutting and the renegotiation of PFI contracts.  Money will also be moved from NHS trusts that are in better financial shape to cover the debt costs at those that are struggling. However, officials are braced for the need to use Whitehall (i.e. government) funds to bail out some hospitals." 


The Telegraph has provided a list of affected hospitals and their P3 debts: click here for details. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More spending on new hospitals and new beds? Nope

Hospital funding:  There is something off about the provincial government's Budget claims on hospital capital funding (funding to build and renovate hospital beds and facilities).    For what it is worth (which is not that much, given the long time frame the government cites), the province claims it will increase hospital capital spending over the next 10 years from $11 billion to $20 billion – or on average to about $2 billion per year.   But, this is just a notional increase from the previous announcement of future hospital capital spending.  Moreover, even if we did take this as a serious promise and not just a wisp of smoke, the government's own reports shows they have actually funded hospital infrastructure about $3 billion a year over the 2011/12-2015/16 period. So this “increase” is really a decrease from past actual spending. Even last year's (2016-17) hospital capital funding increase was reported in this Budget at $2.3 billion - i.e. about ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ford government fails to respond to 72% increase in COVID inpatient days, deepening the capacity crisis

COVID infections continue to drive up hospital costs and inpatient hospitalizations in Ontario. For the most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2022- March 31, 2023) hospital stays related to COVID cost $1.221 billion, according to new CIHI data.   This is about 4% of total hospital spending, creating a very significant new cost pressure beyond the usual pressures of population growth, aging, inflation, and rising utilization.   Costs for COVID related hospitalizations increased 22.2% in Ontario in 2022/23 from the previous fiscal year, rising from $999 million to $1.221 billion.  That rise is particularly notable as the OMICRON spike of late 2021 and early 2022 had passed by the the 2022/23 fiscal year.   The $222 million increase in COVID hospitalization costs came in the same year as the Ford government cut special COVID funding and, in fact, cut total hospital funding by $156 million.     In total, there were 60,653 COVID hospitalizations...
Post a Comment
Read more

The hospital crisis: No capacity, no plan, no end

While Canada has achieved universal public healthcare coverage, that does not mean conservative forces have given up trying to erode that coverage and expand corporate care where it does not currently exist. The battle has become particularly intense in Ontario under the Ford Progressive Conservative government, which is implementing serious cuts to the level of care and moving to bring in for-profit mini-hospitals. Inadequate Staffing.   Less and less of hospital spending is on staff.   Employee compensation as a share of hospital expenditures has consistently shrunk in Ontario. This is not some immutable law of hospital development.  It is in stark contrast with the rest of Canada, where compensation has become a larger share and now accounts for 67.1%. Hospitals in provinces other than Ontario now have 18 percent more staff per capita than hospitals in Ontario. Overall, if Ontario had the same staffing capacity as the other provinces and territories, there would be another...
Post a Comment
Read more