New report shows need to keep up anti-privatization fight

Bait and Switch: How the Ford government's private clinics are taking away from local public hospitals, lengthening wait times and threatening public Medicare, by OHC Executive Director Natalie Mehra, tracks the specific impact of the Ford’s government’s privatization plans, first announced in 2021, which have seen millions in public funds directed to private, largely for-profit clinics instead of public hospitals.

In fact, in their most recent announcements alone, the Ford government redirected $155 million in public funds to private MRI, CT and endoscopy clinics and $125 million to private orthopedic clinics.

While public hospitals are located across Ontario, including rural and northern areas, private clinics that have been given substantial government funding contracts are located exclusively in large urban centres in the south. And many are within a stone’s throw of existing public hospitals that have facilities and equipment sitting unused or underused due to underfunding, the report states.

“We made formal information requests of the hospitals across Ontario and found that the majority of public hospitals have operating rooms that are closed most of the time,” says Mehra. “We also found significant unused MRI capacity in every single region. We asked the hospitals if their machines and facilities are not being run full-time, why not? They told us they operate for as many hours as they’re funded.”

Despite the huge increases in budgets for private clinics, the government hasn’t succeeded in meeting the planned volumes and timelines for their expansion and much of the funding hasn’t been spent.

“Now, after five years, it’s clear that the private clinics have slowed down addressing wait lists, not sped them up, delaying increased volumes for years,” adds Mehra. “Every public interest group out here [including ONA] also told the Ford government that the private clinics would simply be poaching from the staff and resources of public hospitals.”

The evidence also shows that private clinics have brought in new user fees and extra-billing, queue jumping and other practices that are supposed to be illegal, and yet the Ford government has not fined them nor pulled their licenses, the report reveals. As well, private clinics have increased geographic inequities in health care services as well as inequities between the wealthy and everyone else in terms of access to care.

“Our members have firsthand experience of the Ford government pilfering from the public system to line the pockets of their corporate buddies,” notes ONA Provincial President Erin Ariss. “Privatization of health care needs to stop – full stop. ONA has been pushing back hard, lobbying the Ford government at every turn, speaking out in the media, launching powerful public awareness campaigns, distributing petitions and participating in anti-privatization events. But it will take each and every one of us to turn this around.”

Find out what you can do here.