Defend Public Healthcare

With as much fanfare as it could muster, the Ford PC government re-announced its Budget plan of $300 million for hospitals to deal with the backlog of surgeries and procedures caused by the COVID-19 shut down of hospital services.  Despite the (attempted) fanfare, the Financial Accountability Office (FAO) has reported that the government’s budgeted plan for dealing with the backlog will fall hundreds of millions of dollars short of what is required to clear the COVID-19 backlog over three and a half years . The government says it is not working with the FAO estimates (indeed) and declined to make an estimate of how long it would take to deal with the backlog. The government did, however, state that it will “closely monitor” surgical outputs and wait times and will “implement additional measures if needed”. The government claims the funding will enable hospitals to operate at 110-115% capacity. Operating room hours will be extended into the evening and weekends.  That's a lot

For many years, OCHU/CUPE has been concerned the Ontario government would transfer public hospital surgeries, procedures and diagnostic tests to private clinics. CUPE began campaigning in earnest against this possibility in the spring of 2007 with a tour of the province by former British Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, who talked about the disastrous British experience with private surgical clinics. The door opened years ago with the introduction of fee-for-service hospital funding (sometimes called Quality Based Funding). Then in the fall of 2013 the government announced regulatory changes to facilitate this privatization. The government announced Request for Proposals for the summer of 2014 to expand the role of "Independent Health Facilities" (IHFs).  With mass campaigns to stop the private clinic expansion by the Ontario Health Coalition the process slowed.   But it seems the provincial Liberal government continues to push the idea.  Following a recent second OCH

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