Unions and radicals denounce health cuts by Ford that never happened | Toronto Sun - "They came from Renfrew and they came from Kincardine, they came from Hamilton and Peterborough — all to denounce Doug Ford’s “cuts” to health care. Too bad for them and their cause, those cuts have never happened and no, privatization isn’t sucking money out of the system, either. Not that the facts, laid out below, will convince the collection of public sector unions, activists and socialists standing on the lawn at Queen’s Park that they’re wrong. To them, all governments are cutting health care, and all are underfunding it. The rally was organized by the Ontario Health Coalition, a group that says it speaks for hundreds of grassroots organizations, but in reality, speak for the fringe minority... Health-care funding in Ontario is up from $61.3 billion in the last budget the Wynne Liberals tabled to $81 billion in the latest budget from the Ford PC government. That’s an increase of total dollar spending of 32% which isn’t a cut no matter how you measure it. Even after adjusting for population growth and inflation, the Ford government is still spending significantly more on health care... There were also groups denouncing Canada’s assistance to Ukraine as they fight back against Russia’s invasion. There were socialist groups which call for open borders and which celebrate the birthday of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro – a family friend and favourite of our prime minister – despite his brutal policies against his own people. This was the group that NDP Leader Marit Stiles chose to speak to, followed by Liberal Leader John Fraser and Green Leader Mike Schreiner. “We’re not going to let the Conservatives dismantle our public health-care system,” Stiles told the cheering crowd. She left with a chant of “Corruption is our destruction,” but she didn’t denounce the radicals in the crowd calling for Canada to abandon Ukraine or denounce the socialist groups which celebrate Castro or call for open borders. Probably because these radical ideas are at the core of NDP policy, even though they are offside where most Canadians are at... They want all work to be carried out by unionized public sector workers on rigid schedules that make you wait for care. Their concern isn’t your care, it’s their jobs. And on Monday, the opposition parties showed which side they are on and it isn’t you getting faster access to health care. They aren’t concerned about your care, they’re concerned about winning votes from these radicals."
Someone should have shown up with a swastika. Then by previous liberal logic, all of them would've been Nazis
New health minister should not repeat predecessor’s mistakes - "43 per cent of Canadians believe they should have the ability to use their own money to purchase health care from private providers, with a further plurality of Canadians in every province (except Ontario) supporting the ability of patients to pay out-of-pocket for faster access to some surgeries and diagnostic testing. Overall, the survey found that the majority of Canadians (61 per cent) were either outright proponents of private care or were curious (albeit hesitant) about these reforms. Only 39 per cent staunchly defend the purely public status quo. Indeed, a plurality of Canadians also support specific solutions based on the examples of other universal systems around the world. For example, 46 per cent of Canadians support Australia’s use of private insurance for services not covered by the universal public system and faster access in private hospitals, while a majority (60 per cent) support the ability of physicians to practise in both the public and private systems. A majority of Canadians (52 per cent) also support the use of a private health care system that co-exists alongside the universal public system, as is the case in the United Kingdom, where patients can pay for services not included in the public universal health-care system and procedures with long waits in the public system. The most relevant finding, however, given current strains in Canada’s system and the fact that several provinces are expanding the use of contracted services with private providers, is the 78 per cent of Canadians who support allowing for the provision of additional surgeries and testing through private clinics (although 40 per cent of respondents only support this in the short-term to clear surgical backlogs). Together, these findings highlight a clear disconnect between the attitudes of Canadians and the response from Ottawa."
Report prescribes team-based approach to heal Canada's health-care system - "Canada's health-care system may not be the brag it once was, according to former health minister Dr. Jane Philpott. She says it needs a complete overhaul, starting with a team-based approach. "We've had this kind of collective, national myth that we've got the best health-care system in the world, when in fact we pay more than most countries in the world per capita for our health system," Philpott told Matt Galloway on The Current. "We rank well down the ranks in terms of the outcomes that Canadians are getting for that."... Philpott, who is now dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., says the decline of Canada's health-care system is due in part to fewer medical students entering family medicine, and a poorly designed system."
It's time to stop ignoring the Supreme Court on private health care - "too many people are suffering and dying on waiting lists. A report last month from think tank SecondStreet.org found “At least 13,581 patients died while waiting for surgeries, procedures and diagnostic scans (everything from hip operations and heart surgery to CT and MRI scans) in 2021-22.” The report also noted “Surgical waiting list deaths were up 24 per cent among health bodies that provided data since 2018-19.”... And yet, 17 years after a landmark Supreme Court ruling that appeared to open the way to private care we cling to a broken “universal” system that ensures everyone suffers... Other countries allowed private care and the public system had not collapsed, the court found... evidence before the court was that private care helped the public system."
Leftists don't want the poor to get better healthcare. They just want to make sure the rich suffer too, which is why they are so upset at the thought that anyone different might profit with more privatisation
Wynne’s health-care plan is perpetual crisis - Ontario Health Coalition - "When the Ontario Health Coalition tells you Mike Harris did a better job of running the health-care system than Kathleen Wynne, it says something. The coalition advocates for publicly funded medicare, representing more than 400 unions, medical professionals, non-profits, student, ethnic, cultural, women’s, seniors’ and anti-poverty groups. Politically, it leans firmly to the left... while the OHC objected to many of Harris’ health-care policies, at least there was an overall plan in place aimed at achieving recognizable goals, eventually arriving at an identifiable end point. By contrast, she said, the Liberals have created a permanent crisis in health-care funding, designed to keep health care providers in a perpetual state of uncertainty, while the Liberals slowly starve the system of cash. After nine straight years of Liberal cuts to hospital funding in terms of real dollars factoring in inflation, the OHC says, Ontario now ranks near the bottom of all Canadian provinces, and of major developed countries, in terms of public resources devoted to health care. The result has been a wave of hospital and health-care cutbacks across Ontario — with smaller and mid-sized communities taking the biggest hits. This as evidenced by overcrowded emergency rooms, truncated hospital stays resulting in frequent patient readmissions, nurses unable to provide proper care to patients in hospitals and a lack of home care services for them when they get out. The OHC describes the 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINS) the Liberals set up in 2006, ostensibly to improve medical care across the province by integrating services efficiently, as failures, doing little more than the bidding of government bureaucrats."
From 2016
Damn Conservatives underfunding healthcare to destroy it and privatise it! Of course, since the BC NDP is really a conservative party, why not the Ontario Liberals too? Everyone is conservative, so liberal ideas have never been tried, which is why we don't have utopia
Weird. We're told Mike Harris destroyed healthcare too. It's almost as if to liberals, liberals can do no wrong and conservatives can do no right
Surgery wait times in Canada prompt patients to leave country - "“You're too ill. We can't operate.” Those were the words Allison Ducluzeau, 57, said she was told in January, a month after being diagnosed with a rare and terminal abdominal cancer. After several weeks of consultations and inconclusive tests, the British Columbia resident said a surgeon told her she was not eligible for surgery and she might only have between two months and two years left to live... By her calculations, she believes she had surgery approximately three months earlier than the best-case scenario in B.C., because of her trip to the States. And based on the timeline given to her when she was diagnosed, she may not have survived long enough to have the surgery in Canada... The pan-Canadian benchmark for a hip replacement surgery is 26 weeks, or 182 days, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. But based on the provinces' and territories' own electronic wait time estimates, most patients wait longer than that. Ontario had the lowest waiting times, based on these trackers, with an average of 87 days between the time of referral to the first consultation, and 138 days for hip surgery. B.C. and Newfoundland and Labrador indicated nine in 10 patients are waiting an average of 348 and 385 days for hip surgery, respectively... For Edmonton resident Trevor Bukieda, 60, waiting for surgery meant enduring agonizing pain. Bukieda said he started feeling pain in his hip four years ago. The initial X-rays and ultrasound showed minor joint wear, so after a cortisone injection, he continued on with his life. But he said the pain intensified and became unbearable in March of this year. He had new X-rays done, which he says showed that his hip had totally degenerated, and there was no cartilage left at all. In an attempt to ease the pain, Bukieda said, he contacted an Alberta clinic that specializes in hips and knees in hopes of having his injury treated. Three weeks later, he said, he received a letter saying he had been accepted for an appointment to see a surgeon in 14 to 16 months. The actual hip replacement surgery would've taken another nine months' wait, he told CTVNews.ca. Losing patience, Bukieda started looking for out-of-country options and found a clinic in Kaunas, Lithuania, that could take him in as soon as July, three months after his most recent X-rays. “The biggest reason why I chose to go overseas is because once you start waiting, other things start to break down in your system,” Bukieda said. Before the surgery, Bukieda said, his joints were getting worse as the balance compensation to avoid pain in his left hip started to affect both of his knees and other hip... Bukieda's hip replacement surgery in Lithuania fortunately went well and he is now recovering in his home in Edmonton. In total, he said he spent 10 nights overseas and paid approximately $12,862 for the surgery."
Weird. We keep being told that conservative governments are responsible for underfunding healthcare. Yet BC and Newfoundland and Labrador are doing so badly
Opinion: Ottawa’s plan to increase health-care wait times - "The Trudeau government recently announced it will be taking action to increase health-care wait times in Canada. That wasn’t exactly how it worded it but patients should know that longer wait times will likely be the end result. The announcement was of $76 million in health-care funding penalties to seven provincial governments. What did these provinces do to earn such scorn from their federal overlords? They let patients use their own money to pay for diagnostic scans at private clinics. Ottawa doesn’t like that. The Trudeau government wants everyone to depend on the state for all health-care services — even though government wait times are often atrocious. By penalizing provincial governments, the federal government is hoping they will stop allowing private diagnostic clinics to sell MRI scans, CT scans and other similar services to the public. But this begs an obvious question: where will these patients go if they can’t use private options?... Consider what B.C. patient Joan Hama told SecondStreet.org in 2022: She almost died after being forced to wait nearly double the recommended delay for a colonoscopy. Hama’s colon eventually ruptured and sepsis set in. She had to be resuscitated multiple times at the hospital as her family waited to say their goodbyes. While politicians play political games with health care, Joan’s story is the type of real-world consequence, and she’s far from alone. No other developed nation bans patients from using their own money to pay for diagnostics and surgery in their own provinces. Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and other countries with universal health-care systems that outperform ours give patients a choice: use the public system or pay for private care. Those who decide to pay for care end up taking pressure off the public system. Is it any wonder these countries also have shorter wait times and higher quality of care? The Trudeau government’s recent decision is especially disappointing. It seemed last December there might be a ray of hope that the federal government would finally end its prohibition on private options outside our public system. Speaking to media about health-care funding, Prime Minister Trudeau said : “It wouldn’t be the right thing to do to just throw more money at the problem and sit back and watch the problem not get fixed because we didn’t use this moment to say, ‘No, no, no, it’s time to improve the system.’” A few months after the prime minister’s comments, however, he announced more funding for health care with little in the way of reform. In other words, same old, same old. In 1991, governments spent an average of $1,683 per person on health care. Last year that was up to $5,629 . The increase was nearly double Canada’s inflation rate. And yet the problems got worse. More money hasn’t solved our system’s woes."
Of course liberals are cheering this, because they are ideologically opposed to any private involvement
Opinion: After decades of broken health care promises, Canada’s governments need to prove themselves - The Globe and Mail - "total health spending in Canada is forecast to hit a new record high of $331-billion this year, which would represent 12.2 per cent of our GDP. That makes us the highest spender of all similarly developed countries that offer universal care – and yet one of the worst performers. The facts speak for themselves. A 2021 Commonwealth Fund study ranked 11 countries’ health care systems based on access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes; Canada ranked 10th, above only the U.S., which does not have universal care. According to the Fraser Institute’s analysis of OECD data examining 2019, Canada ranks 26th of 28 OECD countries in available physicians, 14th in available nurses and 25th in available acute-care beds per thousand population. In 2016, we had nine times as many patients who had to wait four months or longer for surgery as the French, and 18 times as many as the Germans. For each hospital discharge, Canadians paid double that of the OECD median of countries that offer universal care. Last year, more than 11,000 Canadians died waiting for surgeries, diagnostic scans and appointments with specialists, according to the think tank SecondStreet.org. And The Globe and Mail found that, as of this summer, only one in five British Columbians referred to an oncologist received a first consultation within the recommended period of two weeks, despite the importance of timely treatment in cancer care. In the 2021 Commonwealth Fund report, Canada was also ranked last in equity of the 10 countries with universal care. Our government agencies have documented that Canadians of a lower socioeconomic status have the worst health outcomes and the worst access to care. Any claims that our current system looks after the poor and those in need are false... Provincial and territorial governments seem to have ignored the lessons of the 2004 First Ministers’ meeting on health care, at which they agreed on a 10-year accord with added spending of $41-billion. Then-prime minister Paul Martin called it “the fix for a generation”; it fixed nothing... In the early 1990s, governments decided that our doctors and nurses were treating too many patients and blamed them for rising health costs. Their solution was to cut medical school spots, reduce immigrant health workers and close nursing schools. When I came to Canada in the 1970s, we ranked among the top in the world in doctors per population; we now rank 69th. Governments are lamenting the shortages they created... The suggested strategy of propping up a failed system by pouring in more tax funds corresponds to the maxim, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is a form of insanity... Real solutions are available, including from the top-performing social democracies in the world that outrank us in equity and access. We must end, for instance, the practice of funding hospitals in lump sums once a year, so that each ensuing patient visit does not then represent a cost to the facility. In other countries, each public patient brings revenue, paid by the state, which creates an internal market that incentivizes quicker and better care from hospitals that want more revenue. The provinces should also introduce a care guarantee that patients must not wait longer than a benchmark time, beyond which it is demonstrated that harm may result. If that time is exceeded, the government must fund care elsewhere, even if that involves funding private care or travel to another province or country. Finally, we must eliminate our unique state-enforced monopoly and allow non-government competition with private insurers and providers. Every other country in the world allows that option. Concerns about low-income Canadians being unable to afford private care can be addressed by ensuring public care is so good that private options are unnecessary, or alternatively by funding their private care. A 2022 poll by the firm One Persuades showed that nearly 75 per cent of Canadians believe private insurance should be allowed to access care in the face of unacceptably long waiting lists, paralleling a similar finding in a 2018 Ipsos survey. Governments need to listen to this majority. The only special-interest groups that deserve consideration are patients suffering under the status quo. If they fail in this, they will only prove what Winston Churchill said in 1903: “Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away.”"
Are wait-weary Canadians ready to embrace private care? - "As Ontario reached the two-year mark of the pandemic earlier this year, it secured another grim milestone: the province’s surgical backlog had pushed past a million procedures... A research paper published earlier this year by Ontario 360, an independent public policy project hosted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, also warned of an “invisible waitlist” of people who had canceled appointments or not bothered to make them, because they assumed the health-care system was too busy for them during the pandemic. This invisible waitlist could be a timebomb, as diagnoses happen later and preventative treatment goes undelivered, creating serious health problems for Ontarians later in life... the Ontario government has spent nearly a billion dollars battling the backlog. The government hopes to push through more than 200,000 surgeries and procedures in 2022-23 with incentives to hospitals and Ontario is training surgical staff to better manage waitlists and prioritize the most urgent cases. And while the government has proposed a suite of policy ideas, the one that gathered the most headlines was the plan to increase publicly covered surgeries performed at private clinics that are covered by OHIP, more conventionally known as “private delivery.” Predictably, the plan has set off alarm bells for proponents of Canada’s public health-system system and Canadians who worry about an “American-style” system being imported into their own country. Proponents of private delivery are at pains to point out that this is perfectly acceptable under the Canada Health Act. But are Canadians ready for more health care being provided by private clinics?... “Every other developed country in the world has private clinics as a major part of their health system. And so as provinces struggle with the financial costs and the wait times for health care, private clinics are an option, for sure,” said Janice MacKinnon, who was a cabinet minister in Saskatchewan for a decade and has written extensively about the province’s experience with private delivery. MacKinnon said, from her experience, the key to communicating a policy like this is being open and transparent with the public, rather than shying away from a potential political controversy. The provinces should clearly show the details of the contracts they have negotiated and what they expect the companies to deliver... while the political landscape is stacked up against any government increasing private clinics, MacKinnon said the experience of visiting these clinics is the best argument in their favour. Especially in the latter stages of a pandemic, when people are keen to avoid hospitals, a quiet clinic with lots of parking spaces out front is particularly appealing... with pandemic burnout causing staffing shortages and early retirements among nurses, private clinics could be a tempting option for nurses looking to stay in the workforce, but with less stress. “Imagine if you said to a nurse we can give you a job with a really good salary, 9 to 5, Monday to Friday? That is very attractive after years and years of shifts and nights and being called in for overtime”... In addition to the serious health impacts of wait times, there are economic costs too, as ailing patients forgo wages while they wait for treatment. According to the Fraser Institute, “wait times cost Canadians an estimated $4.1 billion in lost wages and productivity – or $2,848 per queued patient.” This is their conservative estimate; the higher cost is $12.4 billion or $8,706 per patient. The health and economic costs of waiting for treatment have prompted Canadians to find alternative solutions, with many seeking treatments in other countries. Consider the story of one patient who, after experiencing significant wait times for a hip replacement procedure, spent $16,000 (including airfare) to get treatment at a clinic in Lithuania. Not all Canadians can afford to engage in so-called “medical tourism” but the fact that many pursue this option is a testament of a system that is unable to meet the demands of its own people... Remarkably, the provincial experimentation with private delivery options to augment the public health-care system spans the political spectrum. In the case of B.C., an NDP government surprised some Medicare proponents by partnering with the private sector, which is viewed in some quarters as anathema to the public health-care model."
This doesn't stop the conspiracy theory that "conservative" governments are underfunding healthcare so it collapses and can be privatised (of course, they never look at international comparisons to justify their claims)
Liberals simultaneously claim that private provision just bleeds the public system as it doesn't increase the pool of healthcare workers, just gets them to jump - and bash governments for paying healthcare workers too little, which is why there's a shortage of them
‘This is not acceptable’: Federal government fires off warning to provinces over private health-care creep : canada - "Germany also allows the exact kind of two tier insanity that Ford is trying to push here. No thanks. Having worse healthcare than Germany on average is an acceptable price to pay if it means the wealthy and poor get equal quality healthcare, unlike in Germany, where the wealthy can use their wealth to access superiour healthcare."
"Here it is folks. Socialist ideology over health care outcomes. Better fair than good."
"I'm glad you're willing to let everyone else suffer pain and death just to stick it to the rich. (P.S. they'll just leave and get better healthcare elsewhere, you're literally just punching yourself in the stomach)."
Liberals don't love the poor. They hate the rich
Ford puts patients above politics, his opponents want to reverse that | Toronto Sun - "Based on the rhetoric coming out of Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill, you would think Doug Ford was telling everyone to pay for their own surgery and die if they can’t afford it. Of course, the premier of Canada’s largest province is doing nothing of the sort and the people making these ridiculous claims know that. Ford introduced the “Your Health Act” on Tuesday with the goal of speeding up access to vital surgeries like cataracts and knee and hip replacements. The province plans to use existing private health facilities to provide these services at a cost similar to hospitals, in some cases lower, but promising that the patient won’t pay out of pocket... Of course, the Canada Health Act doesn’t forbid private delivery of health care. If it did, then every family doctor in Ontario who operates as private clinics would need to shut down. As would labs providing blood services, X-rays and a host of other services, not to mention the four private abortion clinics in Ontario. No one who opposes private health delivery ever calls for those abortion clinics to be closed, do they? NDP Leader Marit Stiles is convinced that allowing surgeries, other than abortions, in private clinics will be the end of public health care... What is truly shocking is that the point man for the Liberals on this is an owner of a private health corporation... Isn’t it odd that someone who earned their income through a health-care corporation prior to politics is now arguing that we shouldn’t allow this to happen. Apparently, it’s fine for an emergency room doctor, who I’m sure didn’t profit at all, but not OK if it helps people get access to surgeries faster. That’s not putting patients first, that’s putting ideology — and his own profits – first. The Ford government’s legislation puts patients first by putting their timely access to care above ideological arguments. What the opposition at Queen’s Park would prefer is that you wait and suffer for vital surgery to satisfy their personal worldview. That’s not health care, that’s politics."
