Ontario Government's Unconscionable Mistreatment of Seniors
Evidence of Harmful Anti-Social Measures Multiplies
Rally for public health care at opening of Ontario
legislature,
September 25, 2023.
Every day, the people of Ontario live the self-serving nature of anti-social measures one government after the other implements in the name of high ideals. The Ford government, in implementing its anti-social agenda – specifically the privatization and wrecking of the public health care system – continues the path of strengthening police powers to enforce unconscionable attacks on the most vulnerable.
Now, evidence of the nefarious consequences of the legislation passed in 2022 – Bill 7, More Beds Better Care Act – is revealing how harmful these measures are. The act changes the regulations regarding access to long-term care homes. Besides other things, it requires that hospitals charge patients assessed as requiring long-term care for their stay in hospital if they refuse to accept placement in a long-term care home.
In Ontario, access to both public and private long-term care homes is controlled by the state through the health care system. Prior to the passing of Bill 7, seniors or others assessed as needing long-term care were asked to provide the names of up to five homes in order of preference that they would like to or would be willing to live in. When a bed became available it was offered. The person could refuse a placement and stay on the waiting list until a more suitable bed was available.
For many seniors the need
for
long-term care occurs after a hospital
admission. When such an individual in hospital no longer
requires
hospital-level care they can be designated Alternate
Level of
Care
(ALC), and wait for placement in a long-term care home.
Bill 7
allows
hospitals and discharge
planners to assess an ALC patient, share their personal
health
information with long-term care homes, fill in their
applications and
admit them into long-term care homes, all without their
consent.
Hospitals can send patients to homes not of their
choosing up to
70
kilometres away in southern
Ontario and up to 150 kilometres away in the north.
Hospitals
are
required to charge patients $400 a day if they refuse to
accept
a
placement in a home that they and/or their family
consider
unacceptable.
The CBC reported on June 12 that since Bill 7 was passed 424 people have been moved into homes against their will, with about one-third of those in February and March this year. In one case, the refusal by the family of a patient in Windsor to move their mother into a facility that they had checked out and found "disgusting" resulted in a two-month stay in the hospital until an acceptable bed was offered. The family has been billed $26,000 and has no intention of paying.
Several other families have refused to move their loved ones into homes they consider unacceptable either because of the distance from families or the unacceptable conditions of the homes. Many of those who have received bills from the hospitals, like the family in Windsor, are refusing to pay. They are publicly condemning the government for its mistreatment of seniors.
It is the responsibility of the state to provide health care for the people at all stages of life but the outlook of governments whose mission is to pay the rich abandon all social responsibility. What is paramount in their calculations is to hand over control of health care to narrow private interests as a source of guaranteed profits.
Instead of investing in hospitals, long-term care homes and a vast array of community health care services, the Ford government, like those before it for the past more than 30 years, has cut funding and opened up the health care system to private interests, guaranteeing their profits from public funds. Former Premier of Ontario Mike Harris even became an owner of private seniors' homes to make windfall profits. Both private and public homes in Ontario receive government funding and the vast majority of the long-term care homes in the province are now privately owned and operated.
The argument presented for forcing patients out of hospitals and into long-term care homes that are not acceptable to them is that there is a shortage of hospital beds. This is a manufactured shortage. Even when fully staffed, Canada has an acute shortage of hospital beds. Canada has 2.6 hospital beds per 1,000 population, fewer than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 4.3, and even fewer than the U.S. The shortage has reached even more critical levels due to measures that have forced qualified hospital personnel and staff to leave the public system. The democracy in Canada was called participative because when inadequate budgets were imposed, hospital personnel and staff were told to "choose" between keeping beds open and cutting salaries and staff; or raising salaries and cutting beds. In fact both took place.
A shortage of long-term care beds means that there are long waiting lists, particularly for the homes whose services are decent. Bill 7 was designed to kill two birds with one stone: free up hospital beds and force people into long-term care homes with unacceptable conditions.
Investigations into the tragic deaths of hundreds of seniors in private long-term care homes in Ontario during the pandemic revealed the inhumane conditions in some of the private homes. Nothing has been done since to ensure that the living conditions for the residents and working conditions for the professionals and staff in these homes meet a modern and humane standard. In the eyes of the government, seniors and others in need of care are a burden, disposable, without rights and subject to any indignity in the name of 'efficiency.' So too, the workers are disposable.
An example of the disingenuous and mendacious character of these governments is evident in the federal Minister of Immigration's recent announcement concerning foreign home care workers. He said that pilot programs which give permanent resident status to foreign care workers from private household employers are being expanded "to allow for not-for-profit organizations to provide job offers and help address home care needs where labour shortages exist." The announced programs do not address the need for permanent resident status for those who are already working in the country hoping to be reunited with their families here.
What it means is that instead of addressing the needs of the people for proper dignified care throughout their lives, close to their families and communities, in a cultured manner according to their customs and traditions, everything is reduced to matters of dollars and cents which make the rich richer, exploit the vulnerable and abuse the people.
The purpose of the Ford government's Bill 7 and other such measures is to restructure the state so that the word "public" no longer exists. Far from removing the aim given to governments of serving the public good, the very existence of mafia governments which rule thanks to their access to positions of power and privilege must be ended.
In any modern society, health care is a right. To make it so requires the determined fight of the people with the working class in the lead for a change in the direction of the economy to one dedicated to humanizing the natural and social environment. Families of seniors and health care providers have to work together to create the conditions so that No Means No!
This article was published in
Volume 54
Number 6 - June 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/M5400611.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca