Defend Public Healthcare

The Progressive Conservatives (PCs) plan to turn health care funding responsibilities over to 30 to 40 hospitals. These "hub" hospitals would be licensed to move money from one provider in the area to another. This will leave the other 120 or so hospitals beholden to the hub hospitals for funding.  With funding pressures to the fore, centralization of services is becoming a bigger trend, leaving hospitals in smaller communities especially vulnerable in this funding model. Douglas Memorial Hospital, Fort Erie In the last round of PC sponsored restructuring, hospitals in smaller towns and cities were closed and others were merged into multi-site hospital corporations (e.g. the hospitals in the Niagara region).  In the following years, the small hospitals that were merged often lost services to the bigger cities in their multi-site hospital, creating special outrage in Fort Erie, Port Colborne (both in Niagara) Shelburne, and Muskoka, as hospitals in those towns were clo

A senior Liberal official has said the government will bring back the interest arbitration legislation that was defeated when the government brought in its Budget bill earlier this year.  theMatthewBlack “We’ll be taking action and reintroducing the sections of the budget bill that Hudak instructed his party’s members to vote against, even though it was in their   election platform."   McGuinty's comment of a year ago that it was unwise to ' finagle ' with interest arbitration was, I guess, just stuff you say. Toronto Star reporter Robert Benzie suggests the Liberals will first " expand... the wage-freeze push from   teachers   to other public servants in the weeks ahead, before tackling arbitration." The reports came as Tim Hudak and the PCs announced they would be introducing another bill on interest arbitration. The Ability to Pay Act   is basically designed to favour employers in cases of  interest arbitration. (Essential service wor

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

The Ontario government claimed in July that the first year of its so-called "compensation freeze" would save $1.4 billion. It now claims  that last year's deficit was $3.3 billion less than budgeted. This, the government says, will result in absolutely no change in their collective bargaining policy (or the threat of legislation). Nevertheless, if the government's budget figures are to be taken seriously, it's apparent that there is no burning need to save $1.4 billion this year. They had saved that and more already. The goal is political, not, it seems, economic.   Moreover,  the government's fiscal reports seem more political than social scientific.  This is just the latest in the consistent revisions downwards of the deficit estimates by the Liberal government over the last several years. The government is still sticking to its claim that this year's deficit will be $14.8 billion.  That's a rather implausible $ 1.8 billion more than la

Last week Dalton McGuinty hinted that he would bring in legislation affecting collective bargaining across the public sector and now the Globe and Mail reports the government "plans to introduce legislation that would freeze wages for all workers who bargain collectively in the public sector." The government has been reasonably clear that it will legislate if its goals are not met in a given round of collective bargaining, but now they are edging into the idea that the legislation will be across the broader public sector, not just legislation for specific bargaining groups.   “My sense is we’ll be talking about something that is more holistic in nature, more across the board,” McGuinty said.  Broader based legislation attacking collective bargaining has long been advocated by Tim Hudak and the PCs.  But up until now, the Liberals have shied away from this, possibly out of concern that such legislation will fall afoul of the constitution.  The advantage of br

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

The new Progressive Conservative policy paper,  Paths to Prosperity: Patient-Centred Healthcare , isn't just another far right rant like we've heard from Tim Hudak in recent weeks. It does make a few reasonable points: · The Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) lack expertise and provide little value · The health care ‘system’ isn’t so much a system as a loosely connected bunch of sectors. · We need better integration of health care services · More leadership expertise resides at the hospitals than the LHINs · LHIN leaders are beholden to the cabinet · The LHINs cover too big an area and there is little local control  But there are other, bigger problems with the PC paper. Health care restructuring is the central theme of the paper : As is often the case with prospective governments, they see the solution in extensive high level restructuring of health care. The paper proposes the elimination of LHINs and Community Care Access Centres (CCACs)