Defend Public Healthcare

The owners of the Shouldice Hosptial may sell the eight hectares of land that the hospital sits upon. Centric, the prospective buyers of Shouldice Hospital, say they will likely move to a new location after the four year lease is up.  "I think the vendors possibly have other ideas for the property," Centric's Peter Walkey told the Toronto Star . Eight hectares is a lot of land and in condo crazy Toronto it also means a lot of money. If this was a public hospital, that cash (or the land itself)  would stay with the public, for the public's use. But when funding starts flowing to for-profit providers, private interests may prevail. Deb Matthew, the health minister, has to make a decision on the sale.  She wrote to the Star ,  "Our government is committed to public health care. ... No new private hospitals have been, or will be, considered in the future." But she didn't say she would prevent the sale of the Shouldice Hospital to a for profit corpo

As part of its turn from care in facilities, the Ontario government has let the wait lists for long-term care facilities explode.  This problem has been around for several years now, and there is little sign the government intends to remedy the problem.   Instead they simply talk about keeping people in their homes.  It sounds great -- until you need long-term care.   With a tsunami of aging coming, this problem is set to get worse.   Fitting nicely with this plan, the for-profit long-term care industry has commissioned a report that actually calls for less  publicly funded long-term care: instead, the publicly funded long-term care sector would expand into hospital services and provide short-term care.    As noted a few days ago , the private insurance corporations have seized on the government's turn away from publicly funded long-term care and called for an expansion of private insurance for long-term care needs  --  along with private delivery and no price caps to pr

Giant insurance corporations are pushing into long-term care. As part of its austerity song book, the Ontario government has pretended that there is no need to expand long-term care, complex continuing care, rehabilitative care, and other forms of care.  If any needs aren't met, it can all be solved , this fairy tale goes, by home care -- even while there isn't much of that going around.   In that, there is opportunity for corporations.  If government won't insure it, they will - and make a nifty profit doing it.  As noted in an earlier  post , demographic change will drive the growth of long term care for the next several decades.  A recent  insurance industry  report estimates that "the cost in current dollars, of providing long-term care over this timeframe (the aging of baby-boomers) is almost $1.2 trillion. Current levels of government program and funding support will cover about $595 billion of this total cost. As a result, Canadians currently ha

After the announcement by the Liberal govenrment that they would spin work off from hospitals to private clinics, Centric, a corporation with other private facilities in Canada, has now moved in with plans to buy the Shouldice Hospital in Toronto.  Shouldice is an 89 bed, five operating room hospital in Toronto with a staff of 160.  The sale price is $14,250,000. Shouldice Hospital The largest shareholder of Centric is Global Healthcare Investments & Solutions, Inc., based in the USA.   Global Healthcare's CEO formerly led one of the world's largest healthcare corporations outside the USA, Netcare. The Liberal government had said they would turn work over to not-for-profit clinics only. Centric however is a for-profit corporation listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.   The takeover is still subject to government approvals. Centric notes that if all closing conditions are satisfied, closing is expected on or before  O ctober 15, 2012. A Shouldice insider rep

The growing crisis of public private partnership (P3) hospitals in Britain has now forced the health minister to announce that he will be sending in “hit squads” to make savings at twelve hospitals where the P3 contracts have gone “horribly wrong” the conservative   Daily Telegraph  reports. This is a follow up from the government's February  announcement  that seven health care trusts with P3 (or, as the British call them, "PFI") hospitals would get  £1.5 billion in emergency funding to help them avoid cutting patient services as a result of their P3 deals. The Health Minister Simon Burns told the   Press Association , "there are these seven which are at the top of the scale, which are having a significant drag on their day-to-day running because of the PFI costs. The trusts have got significant problems as a result of these irresponsible PFI schemes that the last Labour government allowed, and we have said, with those, that if they have a regime in place th

Below is a list of the 11 US health corporations on the Fortune 500 list.  They had a combined revenue of approximately $272 billion in 2011.   They make about $15 billion in profits. These aren't your friendly mom and pop businesses.  This is BIG business. Trying to reform America's largely for-profit health care system is bound to come up against these interests.  With such large revenue streams they have incredible power and resources to divert health care reform to match their own interests.  They have (literally) billions of reasons to do so. Corporate health care has not led to good results.  The privatized American system is far and away the most expensive health care system in  the world.  Despite this, tens of millions of Americans have no health care insurance and tens of millions more have inadequate health care insurance. Already, we are beginning to see a similar trend (on a smaller scale)  in the long term care, health care infrastructure, and home care s