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Hospital MRIs sit idle overnight as province funds private clinics: report
Posted: September 17, 2026
(September 16, 2026) By: Greg McGrath-Goudie, SooToday.com
New report from Ontario Health Coalition lays out why private health clinics are ‘not benefiting the public’
As the provincial government invests in private MRI and surgical clinics, publicly funded facilities at Sault Area Hospital and around the province sit idle for hours every day.
Despite $155 million in funding announced for private MRI, CT and endoscopy facilities in 2025, the local hospital’s lone MRI machine sits unused for upwards of eight hours overnight on any given day – with similar trends at hospitals across Ontario.
“First they had to put out bidding that would not be necessary, but for the privatization,” said Natalie Mehra, executive director with the Ontario Health Coalition, in an interview with SooToday.
“Then they had to build these redundant MRIs and operating rooms, when we have them existing in every part of Ontario – underused.”
It’s one of many issues Mehra raised in her new report, titled Bait and switch: How the Ford government’s private clinics are taking away from local public hospitals, lengthening wait times & threatening public medicare, where she argues the provincial government’s push for private clinics has failed to improve access to health care while also leaving many paying out of pocket for unnecessary procedures.
“We’re now five years in since the Ford government announced its plans to privatize what are really the core services of our public hospitals — the surgeries and diagnostic imaging — and we can now see what the results are,” she said.
“I think the Ford government, really, now has to answer some very concrete questions about what’s happened here.”
Although Premier Doug Ford has previously said that residents will pay “with their OHIP card, never their credit card” at private clinics, the report found that patients have been deliberately upsold on unnecessary procedures during privately operated cataract surgeries – sometimes walking away with bills as high as $8,000.
“Everything you need for cataract surgery is covered by OHIP,” Mehra said.
“People shouldn’t be put in a position where they’re being manipulated into paying thousands of dollars because they think that their surgery will have poorer outcomes if they don’t, or because they’re just plain lied to.”
For those who cannot afford the bill, or those who live in northern or rural areas where there are exceedingly few private clinics, the lengthy wait times the Ford government aimed to tackle with private clinics have only improved access for certain people.
According to the report, a study by the Canadian Medical Association found that, between 2017 and 2022, the rate of cataract surgeries rose 22 per cent for people in the highest economic bracket while simultaneously falling 8.5 per cent for those in the lowest.
Beyond concerns about inequity, Mehra also argues that the funding used to open private clinics could have been put to better use in the public system.
“All of us are waiting longer for wait times to be addressed because literally it’s taken years to just get these clinics online,” Mehra said.
“I think it’s irrefutable that the wait times for everyone are longer because of all the wasted time and attempts to spend money on privatizing.”
She also points out that public hospital funding has failed to keep pace with inflation in costs in recent years, arguing that investments in private health facilities have created competition with a public system that’s understaffed and underutilized – with operating rooms and MRI machines sitting idle in many cases.
While the provincial budget for public hospitals hit $27.5 billion in 2025/26, and investments in private clinics have only hit hundreds of millions, Mehra said that funding could nonetheless support the public in a better way than a private system can.
“The number of services that money could buy in public hospitals is a lot. I realize that the overall spending figures in public hospitals is on a totally different scale, but it’s also a lot of money to just transfer over to private clinics,” she said.
“I think the more important point is that it costs more to the public and is not accessible to most of Ontario . . . geographically and income-wise, so it’s not benefiting the public.”
Lily Barnes, spokesperson for the Minister of Health, reached out to SooToday with the following statement following publication of this story:
“The Ontario Health Coalition’s claims are entirely misguided. Ontario is proud to have one of the largest publicly funded health-care systems in the world, investing a record $101 billion this year alone, a 64 per cent increase from 2018, to connect more people to the care they need when they need it. Since taking office, we have increased funding for the Sault Area Hospital by over 38 per cent,” she said.
“Our government has increased funding for the hospital sector by a record 4 per cent this year, for the third year in a row, bringing our total investment in hospitals to over 50 per cent since 2018.
“This is in addition to the over $60 billion we are investing to get shovels in the ground for over 60 hospital development projects that will add 3,000 new hospital beds across the province, the 50 new MRI and CT machines we have added in hospitals, the 20,000 new doctors and 100,000 new nurses we added since 2018, the support we have given to hospitals to reduce surgical backlogs increasing of publicly funded, same-day hip and knee surgeries by 4,260 per cent and 5,840 per cent respectively and, the $3.4 billion we are investing to connect every person to primary care by 2029,” Barnes said.
