Ford Government's Anti-Social Offensive Deepens Crisis in Health Care

The Need for a Human-Centred
Health Care Delivery System

Ontario's spending on public health care is one of the lowest per-capita of all provinces in Canada. Still, its total annual health care budget stands at close to $58 billion, and given the neo-liberal agenda of consecutive Ontario governments of every political stripe, health care spending has become a cash cow for global monopolies providing consultants, planners, accounting, supplies and services in the lucrative for-profit health care industry. Front-line health care workers and their organizations, as well as Ontarians, 49 per cent of whom accessed the health care system in 2018, are the ones who have first hand knowledge and know best that this direction is unsustainable and straining the health care system to the breaking point. It is their voice that must be heard in addressing the problems of health care. Having their voice in the halls of government where the decisions are taken, would go a long way to addressing the problems confronting public health care.

On January 31, the Ford government received a report from the Premier's personally-appointed advisory committee entitled Hallway Health Care: A System Under Strain. The Chair of this committee is Dr. Rueben Devlin, a former CEO of Humber River Hospital who has had a direct hand in administering neo-liberal health care policy. More significantly he is a former President of the Ontario PC Party, and a member of Premier Doug Ford's election team. So, he is not just any old hospital CEO. Devlin was appointed special advisor to the Premier on the day of Ford's swearing-in, with an annual salary of $348,000. It is also noteworthy that none of the members of advisory council were front-line staff who have to bear the brunt of the health care crisis in Ontario.

The report purports to recognize the problems of patients accessing the system and of staff who deliver the services, but in fact it dismisses the problems and the measures to address them long identified by front-line health care providers. Instead it sets the stage for a second report to follow in the spring which will make recommendations to the government, for concentrating decision-making power in the hands of fewer and fewer government appointed administrators. Not only will this further dehumanize both conditions of work of care-givers and of accessing health care services for patients, it will enable the monopoly capitalists in the for-profit health care industry to capture even more of the social wealth appropriated from working people in the form of tax dollars spent on public health care.

The report acknowledges, among other things, that on any given day there are at least 1,000 patients receiving care in Ontario hospital hallways. It acknowledges that in November 2018 there were 4,665 patients in hospitals because the average wait time to access alternative care options is six days for home care or 146 days for a long-term care facility bed. It acknowledges that infectious diseases contracted while in hospital are expensive to treat and place a considerable burden on the system, lengthening hospital stays by two weeks on average.

Yet the Premier's special advisor outright ignores that repeated studies have shown that the reason people are dying from infections like C. difficile contracted in hospital lies primarily with under-staffing and overcrowding of hospital wards. The inhuman outlook of the Premier's advisory council is such that their report outright declares that adding more beds to the system will not solve the problem of hallway health care in Ontario! Incredible!

Also on January 31, a draft copy of a government bill entitled the Health System Efficiency Act was leaked to the NDP, who made it public. The draft legislation reveals that the Special Advisory Committee's first report to identify problems and its forthcoming second report to recommend solutions are a sham. The draft legislation indicates "solutions" have already been decided, namely: achieving efficiencies in delivery mechanisms, economies of digital medicine, on-line appointment making, and economies of scale for supply chain management of goods and services used by hospitals etc., to achieve an "integrated" approach to health care delivery to be managed by a "Super Agency."

Speaking about the leaked legislation, Natalie Mehra, Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition said, "The legislation is an omnibus bill. It would necessitate amendments to dozens of pieces of major health care legislation. It gives unprecedented powers to the Super Agency to order the privatization of any health provider's procurement and supply chain. It does not define -- and therefore does not limit -- what ‘procurement' and supplies could be included. In plain language, the Super Agency would be able to order the privatization of whole swaths of health care and support services. It also enables the Super Agency -- made up of 15 appointees of Ford's cabinet -- to order the specific company to which the services are privatized. These powers have never been passed in Ontario law before. They are extraordinary privatization powers."

Furthermore, creating a Super Agency, will have the effect of even further removing the ability of the public to have any input whatsoever. Mehra elaborated that "the drafters of the bill purposefully left out virtually all if not all the public interest provisions that we have won in amendments to the LHINs (Local Health Integration Networks) legislation. Requirements that board meetings be held in public and limiting secret meetings? Eliminated. Appeals, more robust public consultations about planning and restructuring decisions? Gone. Requirements that LHINs measure and plan for population health needs, also gone. Principles to guide health planning and restructuring? Erased. It would have been a disaster if the Ford government had finished drafting this legislation and pushed it through the Legislature with very limited time and ability for us to stop it."

The Ontario Health Coalition and the Ontario Federation of Labour immediately called on the Ontario government to throw out the draft legislation and scrap all plans for the privatization of health care in Ontario. They also launched an online petition which can be accessed here. The OFL also announced a province-wide political action campaign starting the last week of February in London, Waterloo, North Bay and Durham and leading to a province-wide assembly in Toronto at the Metro Convention Centre on March 25 entitled the "Power of Many."

This article was published in

Number 4 - February 7, 2019

Article Link:
Ford Government's Anti-Social Offensive Deepens Crisis in Health Care: The Need for a Human-Centred Health Care Delivery System

    

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