Do you want our public hospital services to be privatized for profit hospitals and clinics? Yes, or no?

BY PAUL JUNOR

The Ontario Health Coalition has been at the forefront of fighting for the rights of Ontarians to access the full benefits and privileges of the public health care system.

Their primary goal is to protect and improve our public health care system. They work to strengthen the principles of the Canada Health Act (CHA). They describe themselves as a non-profit, non-partisan public interest activist coalition and network.

There are four core values that are essential to their operation, which are: equality, democracy, social inclusion and social justice, as well as five principles of the CHA: universality, comprehensiveness, portability, accessibility and public administration. As a network of 500 grassroots community organizations, they seek to provide members of the public with more information on their health care and engage with public policy.

The announcement by the Ontario government that it is proceeding with plans to increase privatization of surgeries, diagnostics, private hospitals and clinics to for-profit and hospitals have raised alarms in many sectors of the healthcare system. In addition, by introducing new legislation and voting against amendments to the legislation, it has shown that it intends to pass Bill 160 into law once debate after third reading is completed. OHA is very concerned that the majority of Ontarians have been left out of the Government’s plans to go ahead with privatization of Ontario hospitals.

In a communication from the OHC it listed several actions that have been done so far:

• The government has already called for bids for three new private day hospitals to do 14,000 cataract surgeries initially as well as diagnostics.
• They have given repeated boosts of tens of millions to expand existing private clinics to cover care for “thousands of patients.”
• They are expanding the number of private clinics and intend to further expand the volumes as well as to expand the types of surgeries they privatize. They plan to have private hip and knee surgeries up and running by 2024.
• At the same time the government has underspent the health care budget and the COVID budget every year by billions of dollars.

OHC is highly concerned that while the Ontario government has reduced spending on health care by $1.25 billion, it has pumped more money into private for-profit clinics and hospitals. This is a transfer of millions of dollars from the public health system to private for-profit clinics. The fact that hospitals across Ontario have to close their emergency operating room at 4:00 p.m, weekends and during the week is truly disturbing.

The OHC is particularly concerned that patients are paying exorbitant costs for services, which is in direct contravention of the Canada Health Act. Patients are facing excessive charges and getting access to doctors, tests and surgeries. There is a great concern that the privatization of a wide range of services will lead to a two-tier health system, and the resulting privatization of public hospitals will dismantle the public hospital systems and thus single-tier public medicare.

On Tuesday, April 18^th, 2023, there was the official launch by the health coalitions of the campaign to stop the privatization of Ontario’s public hospitals. On Wednesday May 3^rd, 2023, the OHC held a briefing as well as a question-and-answer session to address vital issues such as:

• Real-world experience of privatization in Canada, U.S, and internationally
• What the evidence shows regarding its impacts on: quality of care, health care costs, quality and deregulation for the workforce, and the foundational principle of equity in health care

The OHC has seen fit to mount a community-run referendum on Friday May 26^th, 2023, and Saturday May 27^th, 2023. Thousands of voting stations will be open across Ontario at: local grocery stores, coffee shops, outside grocery stores, community centres and legions.

Online voting will be able to be done on the website: PublicHospitalVote.ca as well as at certain workplaces. The question that will be on the ballots is, “Do you want our public hospital services to be privatized to for profit hospitals and clinics? Yes, or No?”