Government data suggests for-profit long-term care bed s are less desired by the public than not-for-profit beds. There are long wait lists for a beds in long-term care (LTC) facilities. (This is driven by the government's decision to add only a few new LTC beds despite the rapid growth in the number of people 85 and older, the main users of these beds.) But some LTC facilities attract longer line-ups than others. In early 2014, there were 41,842 beds at private, for-profit LTC facilities in Ontario (54% of the total of 78,138 beds). But only 6,781 people in the community put themselves on a wait list for one of these beds. In other words, each for-profit bed has 0.16 people on the wait list for it. In contrast, there were 19,599 not-for-profit LTC beds (25% of the total), but 9,113 people put themselves on the wait list for them. In other words, there were 0.46 people waiting for a not-for-profit bed. That is 2.9 times higher demand than fo
Notes from Leftwords -- Doug Allan