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Private health-care clinics leading to inequality of access, CUPE says
Posted: June 16, 2025
(June 16, 2025) By: Elliot Ferguson, The Kingston Whig Standard
Privatization of cataract surgery has resulted in uneven access to the procedure and increased its cost, the Canadian Union of Public Employees says.
Five years of increased government funding of private health care has increased the inequality of access for cataract surgery, according to Canada’s largest public sector union.
And the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU-CUPE) said the government’s plans to expand private surgeries is part of an effort to privatize the province’s health-care system.
“This is this is deeply concerning because the Ontario government has now announced plans to roll out the privatization to hips and knees and other surgeries, and the premier has said he can see half of the surgeries in Ontario being performed outside of hospitals,” Michael Hurley, president of OCHU-CUPE, said at a press conference Monday morning in Kingston.
OCHU-CUPE, which represents 50,000 hospital and long-term care staff, is calling on the Ontario government to halt its recently announced plan to spend $280 million to fund for-profit surgical centres.
Hurley said surgeries at these private, for-profit clinics are available only to those who can afford to pay and the procedures cost more than those performed in hospitals and are becoming less available to people who can’t afford to pay for private procedures.
Hurley said the Ontario Health Coalition has documented hundreds of cases of private clinics illegally charging patients for medically necessary services and add-on services that patients felt compelled to purchase.
An increased reliance on private clinics has also increased wait times for cataract surgery in Ontario, said Doug Allan, a researcher with CUPE.
“Since privatization, Ontario’s cataract surgery, the ability to meet the benchmark wait times has declined despite the extra funding that has gone to the for-profit clinics,” Allan said. “It’s not an improvement, it’s things have gotten worse.
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“We are now significantly behind the rest of Canada in terms of our ability to provide cataract surgeries in a timely basis. That isn’t something that we should be proud of,” he added.
Hurley said a recent CUPE survey of more than 1,000 people showed widespread support for continued support for a publicly funded health-care system, with about three quarters of respondents indicating that public spending on hospitals instead of private clinics should be a priority and 84 per cent saying hospitals are understaffed.
“Isn’t this really core to how we define ourselves as Canadians in the sense that one of our fundamental values is that we treat everyone equally, especially in matters of health, and give everyone equal access to life saving and other health interventions,” Hurley asked.
“In this moment of defining ourselves as a nation in contrast to the United States and identifying what it is about being Canadian that’s so important and valuable and unique, one of the key things has got to be our the fact that we take care of each other, that we have collectivized responsibility for health care and made it not about income but made it about need,” he said.
