Defend Public Healthcare

Public private partnership "funding for new infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, does not provide taxpayers with good value for money," according to the Treasury Select Committee of the British House of Commons. The Committee found that the capital cost of even a low risk P3 project is over 8%  – double the long-term cost of government borrowing. Higher borrowing costs since the credit crisis mean that PFI (as the British call P3s)  is now an ‘extremely inefficient’ method of financing projects, according to the Committee. Analysis commissioned by the Committee suggests that paying off a PFI debt of £1bn may cost taxpayers the same as paying off a direct government debt of £1.7bn. The Committee also stated it has "not seen any convincing evidence that savings and efficiencies during the lifetime of PFI projects offset the significantly higher cost of finance." The business publication  Health Investor   adds  that PFI schemes perform poorly in s

The London Evening Standard reports that the 75,000 residents and staff of the for-profit nursing home chain Southern Cross still remain in the dark about their future, over a month after the business announced it was going kaput.  Britain's biggest nursing home business missed a deadline to announce the future operator of each home. The plan was to "sell" each home's operation back to the landlords by 1 August.   Now , Southern Cross claims it will make an announcement within two weeks, according to the Press Association . Nationwide the firm has 752 care homes and some 80 different landlords. The Standard reports that analysts expected that between 25 and 35 different operators would take over the homes. "The ongoing delay is highly frustrating for residents and staff," said Justin Bowden, national officer of the GMB union. "Southern Cross is at the mercy of its landlords." Public sector spending cuts, declining bed occupancy, and t

It's amusing to see the Harper government   begin to prepare the way   for stimulus spending should the economy dip into a second recession. After the election, the Harper government changed its focus to curtailing public spending  -- or, as they like to refer to it, “lowering the deficit”. Programs for working people would  have to be scaled back. But curtailing spending (and reducing the deficit) is, apparently, quite expendable if the economy tips downwards.  If events do go this way, I'm betting that most of the stimulus will go directly to corporations (and the well to do) via infrastructure spending, cash for struggling corporate industries, and tax cuts.   Programs aimed at working people will get short shrift from these guys: the squeeze on these programs may even get worse.   And that's a pity -- the government stimulus may be necessary to stop capitalism from choking off its own growth, but why not stimulate growth by supporting programs for working people, i

A very interesting piece on changes in hospital food at the Sarborough Hospital came out a few days ago on the hospital's blog site . There has been a huge change in the food in recent decades. The blog indicates that the General site of the Hospital had in 1984: 770 beds 2 complete, fully operational conventional kitchens a 16 day selective menu (patients made choices from multiple options) hundreds of complex therapeutic diets procurement of fresh and local meat/poultry and produce hundreds of recipes produced in house from scratch by: 15 cooks, 2 bakers, 3 salad and sandwich makers, all skilled, passionate and dedicated! and a GREAT reputation for food! Now the General site has: 325 beds 1 complete NOT fully operational conventional kitchen a 7 day non-selective menu (that’s right, NO choice) hundreds of complex therapeutic diets procurement of 80% of all food supplies from a large multi-national food distribution company (not sure where the food is

There is a lesson in the government take-over of the Niagara Health System (NHS) for hospital bosses. The NHS hospital bosses pushed and pushed the so-called "Hospital Improvement Plan" even when the local communities rose up in revolt. Even the Ontario Hospital Association (or at least its CEO) waded in  to fight the plan's critics. The ultimate result? The government, facing an election and even more problems at the hospital (in the form of superbug outbreaks) turned tail and admitted the hospital had lost the confidence of the community. (Duh!) First, the hospital CEO was removed  by the hospital board in January, then the government announced in May  it would allow a review of the Hospital Improvement Plan, and now the government is putting the hospital under a supervisor. Will the hospital board be next? The government will push hospital leaders to do their bidding without complaint, but can those hospital leaders count on back up when the going get

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association  concludes that diverting patients from overcrowded hospital Emergency Rooms (ERs) is linked to a 3 percent higher risk of death for heart attack patients. The study was based upon 14,000 medicare patients in California. "For every hundred patients there are three avoidable deaths," said Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency physician at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study.  "Now we actually have empirical evidence to show crowding affects patients in a very real way," Hsia told Reuters . "We know as practitioners it's very unpleasant to work when it's crowded," said Hsia. "You kind of know that you're not able to give patients enough attention because everybody is running around. Now we know we have to pay more attention to this, because patients are dying from it." Steven L Bernstein of Yale University School of Medicine told Reuters that ambulanc

A new study from researchers at U.S. and Canadian universities has compared the administrative costs to doctors of Ontario's public health care insurance with the US system, where doctors are required to deal with a myriad of private insurance companies. Here's what they concluded : "Physician practices, especially the small practices with just one or two physicians that are common in the United States, incur substantial costs in time and labor interacting with multiple insurance plans about claims, coverage, and billing for patient care and prescription drugs. We surveyed physicians and administrators in the province of Ontario, Canada, about time spent interacting with payers and compared the results with a national companion survey in the United States. We estimated physician practices in Ontario spent $22,205 per physician per year interacting with Canada’s single-payer agency—just 27 percent of the $82,975 per physician per year spent in the United States. US nursi