Ontario
Nefarious New Health Act Receives Royal Assent
On May 18, the Ontario Ford government's Bill 60, Your Health Act, received Royal Assent. Amongst other things, the new law permits core medical services currently done in publicly funded hospitals, including surgeries and diagnostics, to be delivered by private for-profit hospitals and clinics.
The government has announced that
its initial plans are to move
14,000 cataract surgeries to new private day hospitals that it
says
will be up and running by next fall. It has also announced that
it plans to privatize hip and knee surgeries by 2024. Both
cataracts and
artificial joint surgery
require implantation of medical devices -- cataract surgery
involves
placing an artificial lens, while joint surgery involves a
prosthesis
or artificial joint. These surgeries provide the private clinics
the
opportunity to "upsell" from the no longer up to date standard
prosthetic implants provided
through the
OHIP system, with patients offered a "choice" to pay the
difference of potentially thousands of dollars.
Bill 60 also privatizes the oversight of the private clinics and deregulates health care staffing including who can call themselves a doctor, a surgeon, a nurse, an MRI technologist, a respiratory therapist and more.
This is taking place as the Ontario government has already announced repeated rounds of tens of millions of dollars for private health clinics, while cutting back on its funding for public health care which in a modern society is duty-bound to address the actual needs of the people and the health care system.
It is also taking place in the midst of determined organizing work of Ontario health care workers which puts forward solutions to the health care crisis. This crisis is caused by the neo-liberal anti-social offensive which diverts money from public programs to pay-the-rich schemes. Subsequent governments have exacerbated the crisis at every turn by attacking the workers with legislated pay caps and limits on what health care workers can negotiate. The aim is to create conditions for an argument on the greater efficiency of privatizing by preventing the workers from addressing problems such as staffing shortages and staff burnout in a manner that favours the workers and the public health care system.
Like in Quebec with Bill 15, An Act to make the health and
social services system more effective,
the restructuring of the health care system in Ontario on a
blatant
for-profit basis is coming out of the pandemic and taking place
in the
midst of negotiations with health care workers for
contracts which defend their rights and the rights of patients.
Outside
of these negotiations the government is making significant
changes to
the health care system and imposing them as a fait accompli,
as if the
workers are irrelevant to the actual functioning of the system.
This article was published in
Number 28 - May
25, 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2023/Articles/WO10284.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca