Skip to main content

Liberals support more private clinics - even as clinics turn on them


The Ontario government has gotten into another donnybrook with private clinics for a second time in less than a year.  

Over the summer, they got into a messy dispute with private physiotherapy clinics.

The government stopped 94 physiotherapy clinics from directly billing OHIP. Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews said that, over the years, licences to provide these services have been bought up by large corporations.  Moreover, she charged, the "existing 94 clinics have had an unlimited ability to bill the government and have become very creative in they way they bill."



The government claimed that an audit of 15,000 records from the clinics found that 58% of them failed to support OHIP billings.  Five-minute exercise classes were sometimes billed as physiotherapy,  care plans did not measure up, record keeping was incomplete, and  physician referrals were sometimes lacking.

“There is extraordinary growth in expenditures and the audit was one of those factors that just demonstrated to me that there were companies who were just taking advantage of the way the program was set out and taking advantage of their unlimited ability to bill OHIP,” Health Minister Deb Matthews told theStar.

Despite this, the government is actually turning more work over to private clinics, planning to turn over hospital surgeries and other hospital work.

But now the government is back at war with private clinics: the newly established private plasma clinics. The government, opposed to their plan to pay people for their plasma, wants to shut them down.


But the clinics refuse. Indeed, they say they need no license from the government to operate .

In the face of this open defiance, Health Minister Deb Matthews has been reduced to calling in inspectors and threatening to get a court order.  New legislation is also threatened. 

“I expect any company operating in Ontario, and especially in the health care sector, to operate within our laws,” Matthews told the Toronto Star.

But she admits it may take time to shut the clinics down.

The private clinics remain unmoved: “Until that act is passed, the legal opinion we have is we don’t need a licence from the provincial government.”

It sounds a bit like they are playing for time -- an election is coming and, perhaps, a Progressive Conservative government would be more friendly.

With this sort of attitude, it's hard to know why the Liberals are so hell-bent to bring in more private clinics to take over public hospital work.


The Ontario Health Coalition is setting up community and workplace votes in communities across the province to stop the privatization of public hospitals to private clinics. OCHU/CUPE is working with the OHC to help facilitate the vote April 5.  See the OHC web page for details for how you can help, or contact OCHU.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 in Ontario in 2022/3, up from 47,543 in 2021/2. 

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 15% more th

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 33,778 full t