Worsening Crisis in Ontario Long-Term Care and Nursing Homes
Picket by health care workers at one of private senior care companies during pandemic, July 3, 2020.
A change of direction is urgently needed!
Stop paying the rich! Increase investments in social programs!
During
the pandemic, residents in Ontario long-term care and nursing homes
suffered a huge infection rate and many deaths. Investigations found
serious deficiencies in staffing levels, protocol, maintenance and the
buildings themselves, which contributed greatly to the tragedy.
Reports are now emerging that instead of rectifying the situation as the people demand, many private owners of the long-term care and nursing homes are selling the buildings to global real estate cartels. According to the new prospective owners, the current residents will be forced to leave as the buildings will be transformed into condos or market rental units. This is aggravating an already critical situation for many Ontario seniors.
The widespread deaths in long-term care and nursing homes during the pandemic exposed many of the facilities as not fit for humans. People demand new modern standards for housing where seniors can find peace in their final years. Those in ownership and control of most long-term care and nursing homes declare that investing in improvements such as proper staffing levels will negatively affect their private profit and have decided instead to sell their property.
Last March a fund bought Cedarvale Terrace a privately-owned long-term care home in Toronto. The new owner has since applied to the city to tear down the facility to build a 19-storey condominium. Reports suggest this is not an isolated incident as privately-owned long-term care and nursing homes across Ontario are flipping their property to cash in on soaring property prices. They are selling out rather than making the necessary investments to improve conditions to modern standards. Twenty privately-owned seniors' homes across Ontario, whose licences expire in June, 2025 have said they are planning to flip their property to developers. Some suggest the "flipping" may be to themselves through numbered companies to avoid any commitment to continue as long-term care homes and thereby cash in on the condo development boom cycle.
Six
of the twenty facilities are located in Toronto where demand for
long-term care beds is most acute. Those six homes alone in Toronto
account for more than nine per cent of the city's long-term care beds.
The owners of three of those homes have already either closed or are
closing their
facilities and have sold the land: Cedarvale Terrace for $32 million,
Vermont Square for $11 million and Garden Court Nursing Home for $5.5
million.
Privately-owned companies own around 60 per cent of Ontario's 626 long-term care and nursing homes. Even before the pandemic the crisis was evident. A 2017 report by the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (now called Home and Community Care Support Services) warned that operators of eight of the region's 36 nursing homes intended to leave the city and another six were at risk of leaving.[1] Even while facing an escalating crisis following the pandemic, the Ford provincial government refuses to invest in any facet of long-term care and nursing homes other than to provide operating funds to owners seeking private profit.
One of the ways in which funds are provided is through a construction subsidy given to private entities to renovate older nursing homes. According to a CBC report, the Ontario government has increased this subsidy as part of a plan to upgrade 28,000 long-term care beds by 2028. The subsidy normally ranges from $20.53 to $23.78 per bed, per day, paid to the operator on a monthly basis for a period of 25 years. However any projects which started construction by August 31 this year will receive an additional subsidy of up to $35 per bed, per day, also for 25 years.
Dr. Samir Sinha, the head of geriatrics at Sinai Health System in Toronto, reported to the media that the current model of private ownership of nursing homes "is a huge vulnerability for the province."
Dr. Sinha said, "There's a danger that actually providing care in these homes is a side business to the real business, which is actually property plays and making money."
A
two-tier system exists throughout the health care system based on the
resources of the person seeking assistance. This flies in the face of
modern principles of universality and accessibility, as all people have
equal rights by virtue of being human. Peoples' rights cannot and
should not be
undermined by those seeking private profit from health care including
long-term care and nursing homes. The aim of private profit negates the
modern necessity to guarantee the rights of all. Private profit-seeking
turns humans and their needs into things and opportunities for profit
rather than
affirming the rights of all.
The claims that human beings are entitled to make on society, including proper care in old age, are the real engine of development in any modern society, which already has reached a high level of productive power. The building of a modern society fit for human beings and moving society forward in today's conditions begins with the recognition of the rights of all that belong to them by virtue of being human and that governments have a duty to guarantee those rights in practice.
Some suggest a step towards a modern Canada fit for all seniors is for the federal and provincial governments to form public construction, maintenance and operating enterprises that provide the highest quality long-term beds to all who require them. The price of production for building, maintaining and operating the public facilities would come directly from the gross income of companies in the socialized economy that employ more than twenty workers. The amount would form part of the social reproduced-value the working class produces collectively and claims in return for selling its capacity to work to those who own and control the main means of socialized production.
Stop Paying the Rich! Increase Investments in Social Programs!
This article was published in
Number 55 - September 29, 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2023/Articles/WO10552.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca