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Showing posts from May, 2016

Health care funding falls far short even as Ontario heads out of deficit

A new report from the Financial Accountability Office (FAO) confirms the difficulties government cuts are placing on public health care in Ontario.   The FAO is a government-funded but somewhat independent office that reviews Ontario government economic and fiscal claims. This is not a left wing think tank -- rather it is very much part of the received establishment.   Its latest report notes that government spending plans will fall $4 billion short of what is required to maintain services at 2015/16 levels by 2018/19:  “If the quality and nature of public services remain unchanged over the outlook, the FAO estimates that program spending would need to increase by 2.7 per cent per year on average from 2014-15 to 2018-19. However, the 2016 Budget limits annual program spending growth to just 1.9 per cent on average, 0.8 percentage points lower than the growth in the underlying cost factors that drive public sector spending.” Moreover:   "The government’s plans to

Cuts drive crisis for unpaid women caregivers

Cascading health care cuts are resulting in significant problems for home care patients and their families, seriously undermining the main defense the government makes for its policy of hospital and long-term care cutbacks.  With hospital cutbacks and a virtual freeze on long-term care beds, home care and unpaid caregivers must now take care of sicker and sicker patients. This change in home care has been sudden and dramatic, as demonstrated in the graph below  from the the Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres (the OACCAC represents the public sector organizations which manage home care for the government).   The OACCAC suggests  this shift means home care now replaces 150 long-term care homes, each with a capacity of 130 residents.  The OACCAC estimates cost pressures of about 5% per year to offset demographic changes and for the absorption of patients that would otherwise have been treated in hospitals or long-term care.  The OACCAC adds that funding has f