Defend Public Healthcare

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

There has been a general trend downwards in public sector employment in Ontario according to Statistics Canada. In the last two years, Ontario has lost 19,000 public sector workers, with most of the loss occurring in the last year. The downwards trend in Ontario contrasts with the upward trend across the rest of Canada.  While Ontario lost over the last two years, the rest of Canada gained 73,400. Over the last year the rest of Canada gained 65,300 public sector jobs, while Ontario lost 12,700 public sector jobs. This may understate the cuts in the Ontario broader provincial public sector (i.e. public sector workers, like health care workers, that are primarily funded by the province, excluding federal and municipal employees). Austerity has been much harsher for the Ontario government than the federal and Ontario municipal governments. So the Ontario broader provincial cuts may be softened by modest growth in the federal and municipal sectors. The level of public

Health care and hospital funding : Despite significant new revenue and lower than expected debt costs, health care spending is almost exactly identical to the amounts planned in last year’s Budget for 2015-2018.  The total health budget for 2015/16 came in (on an “interim” basis) basically the same as planned in the 2015 Budget (that is unusual, more often they under-spend the health budget).    For 2016/17 and 2017/18, they plan to keep basically to the targets set out in the 2015 budget (plus a small increase of $100 million in each of those two years -- an extra 0.2%).  Overall, health is planned to increase 1.97% in 2016/17 and 1.93% in 2017/18. That will see health expenditures fall again as a percentage of the economy but is a little bit higher than the planned all-program expense increase (of 1% in 2016/17 and 1.7% in 2017/18).  That is far short of costs pressure due to increased utilization, aging, population growth, and inflation.  Hospitals are budgete

Federal Health Cash Transfers  ("CHT") to the Ontario government will rise 5.94% in 2016/17, or by $778 million. This, in itself, would pay for a 1.5% increase in Ontario health care funding even without a single extra penny from Ontario tax revenues.  This follows a $736 million increase (5.96%) to federal health care cash transfers to the province of Ontario for this year. Despite this, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) estimates that total health funding by the Ontario government is only going up by about $352 million this year -- or about 0.7%. This falls well short of aging, inflation, utilization, and population growth cost pressures and deepens  the trend in recent years to reduce health care and hospital funding in real terms.  So far, there are precious few signs that the government will reverse its policy of health care austerity in its upcoming 2016/17 budget. Likely, Ontario funding will fall far behind federal health care funding once