Kingston & Area Health Coalition Planning Public Campaign To Oppose Privatised Healthcare

By Jeff Green

There is nothing new in Ontario’s plan to approve more private clinics, to provide a prescribed set of services for Ontarians. There are already 900 privately owned surgical and diagnostic clinics in the province. On January 16, Doug Ford announced his government’s plan to start offloading more MRI and CT scans, cataract operations and knee and hip surgeries, in private clinics, within the next 18 months.

“These procedures will be non-urgent, low-risk, minimally invasive and, in addition to shortening wait times, will allow hospitals to focus their efforts and resources on more complex and high-risk surgeries,” the provincial government said in a news release.

Ross Sutherland, co-chair of the Kingston and Area Health Coalition, told the News in a phone interview that what the government suggests is a freeing up of hospitals to focus on complex cases, is merely a way to create profit for the private sector without addressing any of the real burdens on the healthcare system.

“Of the main, if not the main, issue in healthcare right now is the staffing crisis. The private clinics will draw from the same pool of nurses and other professionals as the public system, while taking on only the easiest, and most profitable, cases.

“A private clinic will do knee surgery for the healthiest, youngest patients. As soon as they are faced with someone who has a heart issue, or other signs of aging, they will send them to the public systems. And the hospitals will have less resources to deal with these, more needy and more expensive patients, because the private clinics are competing for the same labour pool,” he said. “This is what has happened elsewhere in the country, and the same thing will happen in Ontario.”

Sutherland said that in order to address the very real shortfalls in the health system in Ontario, the solution is not to create a separate system, and then try to make them both work together, but to try and make the public system more efficient.

In Kingston, he said that the way Hotel Dieu hospital and Kingston General hospital have been integrated into one Kingston hospital, with Hotel Dieu offering specific services, is a good example of how to make the public system more efficient and better suited to treat a variety of conditions. New publicly funded specialised clinics in other cities, such as London, have come on stream to improve service.

“Everything they do is integrated into the same healthcare system, however. Under the private system, patients will be treated as long as there is profit in treating them, and then offloaded to the public system. This will not help,” Sutherland said.

He also referred to “up-selling” using cataract clinics as an example. In some cases, private clinicians offer patients an alternative lens to the one funded by OHIP, at a price.

“It could be $400 more, or it could be $4,000 more, but whatever it is, the Ophthalmologist makes a profit on the sale, in addition to their pay from OHIP.”

The Kingston and Area Health Coalition (KHC) held an emergency town hall on December 1st to discuss the shortages that have impacted hospital care locally, and across the province.

At that meeting, some of the specific local issues were identified. The shortage of nurses was a major theme, with one presenter saying there is a shortage of 25,000 in Ontario currently.

The KHC is affiliated with the Ontario Healthcare

Coalition, a coalition of similar organisations across Ontario.

On January 31, the Ontario Health Coalition held an emergency virtual meeting, hosted by OHC Executive Director Natalie Mehra, to talk about strategies to address the latest move of the Ontario government towards privatisation.

“2,400 people registered for the Zoom meeting,” Sutherland said, “which could have been a problem because the limit on Zoom is 1,000. But we knew from experience that less than half of the people who register for a Zoom meeting end up attending, and we were close but still under 1,000 people in the end. But these are numbers that we have never seen before. Most people are not happy with the way the healthcare system is working, but they don’t see any particular benefit in privatising.”

The privatisation plan, according to Mehra, will be “devastating to all medium sized hospitals, small hospitals, rural hospitals, and even some of the community hospitals in our province. It would gut some of the services remaining in those hospitals. Those hospitals are already facing emergency room closures, ICU closures, maternal services closures, closures to the most urgent and vital services that they provide due to staffing shortages. The Ford government has done, essentially, nothing to address the problem.”

The meeting on the 31st is being followed up with a Kingston Health Coalition meeting on February 15 to “organise the fight back against the Ford government’s drive to privatise healthcare.”

One of the province-wide strategies that came out of the OHC meeting on the 31st was to organise a referendum, in May, to demonstrate public opposition to the government plan, which Mehra said is already be - ing put in place, in advance of legislation to be tabled later this month.

The meeting on the 15th will be held over Zoom, and will be devoted to assigning roles and planning the local publicity campaign, and the referendum.

For further information, contact the KHC at Kingstonhealtcoalition@gmail.com.

To view the OHC meeting from January 31, go to the Ontario Health Coalition Youtube channel. A recording of the meeting is the first item that is listed. ■

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