More privatization via Liberal "community care"

Health care privatization continues to come to Ontario via the Liberal government's version of "community care." Most obviously this comes by moving services from public hospitals to poorly regulated and for-profit retirement homes. That has been a repeated theme in the Liberal government's version of community care.

Alex E. Proimos

Another mainstay is moving services to for-profit "home care" providers. Except, now for-profit home care is often for-profit clinical care.

Typically, the Liberal line is we need to move services and clinics out of public hospitals and into the home. But now the government organizations that oversee home care (Community Care Access Centres or CCACs) are beginning to celebrate moving services out of the home and back into clinics.

But this time the clinics are run by for-profit corporations, not public hospitals.

In a recent news story sparked by the opening of a new clinic, the Erie-St. Clair Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) Director of Clinical Services declares that clients "can now come to the clinic for service rather than having to sit at home and wait for a nurse to knock on the door.''

The new 5,000 square foot clinic in question is run by Bayshore, a large for-profit corporation. The plan, the Director suggests is to grow the business at the new clinic by adding new services and programs.

Magically, this for-profit clinic is somehow a community clinic, while public hospital clinics are institutions that must be done away with.

Supposedly, the government wants the integration of health care services. But the introduction of competing, for-profit providers will only deepen the silos by fragmenting and privatizing health care.

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