14% premium payment to privatize hospital surgeries stopped, for now

The British public sector union, UNISON, is claiming a victory over a health care “privatisation tax”, after the Conservative-Democratic government withdrew plans to allow private companies to be paid more than public hospitals for delivering the same services.

The plans would have allowed private companies to get a premium for delivering services to patients, as a way of expanding for-profit provision of publicly funded hospital care. Government documents suggested that this premium could have been as high as 14% more than the public hospitals get.

Ontario has begun to introduce some "fee for service" funding (sometimes referred to as "patient based funding") for hospital procedures -- and this fee for service funding is the basis for the British experiments. But so far there are no reports that the Ontario Liberals are interested in paying a premium fee for service to encourage the privatization of surgeries and diagnostic tests by for-profit corporations.

What a Hudak Progressive-Conservative government might do is another question.

dallan@cupe.ca

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