Defend Public Healthcare

The Toronto Star ran a top of the front page news report yesterday on how the publicly-operated Ornge air ambulance service stopped reporting the salaries of four of its top bosses a few years back.  The excuse the organization is peddling, apparently, is that it has set up some for-profit companies legally separate from Ornge and so does not have to report the salaries under the law. Today, the Star editorialists got in quite a lather about this concluding, "it's up to (Health Minister Deb) Matthews to bring greater transparency to a company that provides a vital public health service and spends quite a lot of taxpayer dollars doing it." This over four unreported salaries?  Wow, call the Mounties. I suppose this does qualify as news, however.  Public providers should report publicly -- and not skirt the rules. But, step back, and the real scandal isn't that the salaries of four public sector bosses aren't reported. Rather it's that the multitude

Negotiations have begun to increase funding in Britain for hospitals laid low by the burden of expensive public private partnership (P3 or, as the British say, PFI) deals.   P3s bring private corporations into hospital support services and hospital financing. A Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospital spokesman told Kent media : “MTW is part of a national review of NHS trusts that require financial assistance to support their private finance initiative (PFI).  The trust is working closely with its PCT commissioners, strategic health authority and the Department of Health as part of this ongoing assessment." Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospital is one of 22 trusts identified as needing cash support to meet its P3 payments. Its privatized P3 hospital is brand new.   British Treasury Select Committee P3 advisor Mark Hellowell recognizes that P3 hospitals have higher fixed costs and so  argues that they must be paid more per procedure than other hospitals. "Since some

The British government,  as  noted ,  is trying to lure pension plans in to the government's deeply troubled public private partnership (P3) infrastructure development. The business oriented newsmagazine, The Economist  reviews this proposal and concludes with some words that should provide some caution for anyone who might need a pension one day. "The infrastructure plan may also point to a longer-term possibility. Two academics, Carmen Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia, have suggested financial repression as one way out of the debt crisis—forcing domestic investors to accept negative real returns. Pension funds are being invited to invest in these plans on a voluntary basis. But their assets are a very tempting pool for politicians to tap. Some day in the future, pension funds may find they are obliged to invest in such projects, regardless of the potential returns—for the good of the country, of course." That would be a very negative outcome for pension plans --

Public sector employment in Ontario was almost exactly the same in the third quarter of 2011 compared with the second quarter, Statistics Canada reports . Ontario 3rd quarter 2010  2nd quarter 2011  3rd quarter 2011 % change  from 2nd quarter 2011  % change  from 3rd quarter 2010 Public sector                                            1,332,209 1,334,248 1,334,883 0.0 0.2 Federal general government 179,183 186,566 181,935 -2.5 1.5 Provincial and territorial general government 92,708 92,705 95,006 2.5 2.5 Over the last year there has been a very small increase in public sector employment in Ontario: 2,674 jobs or 0.2%.   Canada-wide public sector employment increased by 0.5% (18,500 jobs) over the last year, but decreased by 0.3% over the last quarter (a loss of 12,550 jobs).  

The Canadian Construction Association is lobbying the federal government to consider other methods of infrastructure development than the current public private partnership (P3) model. A Vancouver construction industry report indicates that P3s " have worked only for a handful of very large Canadian construction firms. Ninety per cent of the Canadian construction industry, however, is made up of small and medium-sized firms." "The problem is in the financing component of the P3s.  Traditionally, Canadian general contractors have depended on bonds purchased from the bonding industy for financial backing for projects. P3s don’t use bonds in the same way. They require letters of credit – cash from recognized financial institutions.   Often P3s require 10% of the cost of a project covered by money in the bank. On a very large project, that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.   Most construction companies in Canada are not financially l

As noted earlier , the British government is reviewing its use of public private partnerships (P3s, or, as the British call them, PFIs) for the development of public infrastructure like new hospital buildings.  The government now says  it's the   ‘end of PFI as we know it’.      Unfortunately,  they seem to be more interested in simply pulling pension plans and foreign money into the PFI vortex. The PFI advisor to the British House of Commons Treasury Select Committee,  Mark Hellowell waded in to this mess earlier this week . Instead of wrapping pension plans into PFIs, he points to a cheaper way to involve pension plans in infrastructure. "The Treasury is currently pulling its hair out trying to find ways of bringing pension funds into infrastructure investment. But the cheapest way to do this is, of course, to sell bonds to them.  They will currently buy them at a real interest rate of something like minus 3% – not bad for projects that will put people into work in th

Don Drummond, who is developing a report on public sector reform for the Ontario government, does not want to attack the Canada Health Act (CHA) -- or at least not directly. The CHA is the federal government legislation which enshrines the five principles of Canadian public health care:  Universal, comprehensive, accessible, portable and publicly administered health care for all Canadians. Drummond made this plain in an interview with CBC television about the Canada Health Act and privatization: "[P]ut the word privatization, say the word Canada Health Act and you've got a heart attack, you've got an increase in people going to the hospitals just at the mention of those words. You have to be so careful how you approach this thing. So you have to roll some things off the table right at the beginning and then really focus that all this is about is improving the efficiency and that what we're actually trying to drive up the quality of the care, we're not tryin