Health care workers and advocates say nothing good can come out of a government plan to privatize hospital surgeries, calling the plan “a Trojan horse.”
A 15-foot tall Trojan horse is being brought around Ontario, as unionized workers put pressure on the Ford government to abandon privatization plans and put that money back into public hospitals.
The horse made a stop at Guelph General Hospital and St. Joseph’s Health Centre Wednesday.
“We need all hands on deck to fight this privatization, and win this fight against our government,” said Mark Zinger, a registered nurse at Guelph General and vice president of CUPE Local 57, which represents registered practical nurses, PSW’s, cleaners and other hospital workers.
Legislation was passed last year to expand access to private, for-profit clinics.
Zinger took aim at these clinics, calling them "unaffordable."
“Not only are they charging patients out-of-pocket, but they are also charging the government far more than public hospitals for the same services,” he said.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the cost for knee surgery in a public hospital is about $10,000. At a private clinic, the cost is almost three times as much.
Zinger said a private clinic in the GTA was given $1,264 by the government, per eye, for cataract surgeries, compared to $508 at public hospitals.
He said the government will justify this type of spending as trying to address a surgical backlog. But he fired back and said private clinics don’t “magically create additional capacity.”
“They are not an add on, they're a takeaway,” he said, adding the private sector poaches staff from the public sector, creating staff shortages and longer wait times in the process.
He said as staffing levels worsen in public hospitals and government funding goes up in for profit clinics, it creates unequal access for patients, where those with money can jump the queue and get serviced.
“That is a dangerous precedent, and we can’t let this become a new normal in Ontario,” Zinger said, adding you only need to look at health care in the United States to see the “havoc” that private clinics create.
“It’s increasing the wait times, it won’t alleviate the crisis in our hospitals, the crisis around staffing and the crisis around beds and really the crisis that the patients need in these public hospitals,” said Sharon Richer, the secretary treasurer of the Ontario Council of Hospitals.
She called the plan “deceptive” and “dangerous to our public hospitals.”
Richer added it’s going to create a two-tiered system, benefiting the wealthy, who can spend extra to get medical services quicker.
So why the horse?
Richer said it is a “perfect” metaphor for the government’s plan.
“He’s talking to Ontarians, and he’s talking to them that it has been a gift that he’s giving us,” she said.
In Greek mythology, the wooden horse is accepted into the city of Troy as a fake gesture of peace during a war. At night, Greek soldiers inside the horse came out, opened the front gate and soldiers destroyed the city from the inside to win the war.
Richer said the plan isn’t a gift at all, adding it is devastating the public health care system.
In response, a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the province has made “record investments in our publicly funded healthcare system,” and touted the government’s investment of over $85 billion into the system this year.
“We have increased our investment across the hospital sector by four per cent for a record two years in a row, we are getting shovels in the ground for over 50 hospital development projects across the province,” Hannah Jensen said. “Over the last two years, we have registered a record number of new nurses, adding 32,000 new nurses, with another 30,000 studying nursing at one of Ontario’s colleges or universities and since 2018, we have added over 12,500 new doctors to the healthcare workforce. But we are not stopping there.
“We have increased publicly funded diagnostic imaging capacity by an additional 97,767 MRI and 116,443 CT operating hours, adding 32,000 OHIP-covered cataract surgeries, eliminating a 180,000 person cervical cancer screening test backlog, and achieving some of the shortest wait times of any province in Canada, with nearly 80 percent of people receiving their procedure within clinically recommended target times.”
