Dozens of people gathered in Windsor Saturday to protest increasing privatization of Ontario’s health-care system. 

The protest was part of a series of province-wide events that took place in London, Hamilton, Kitchener, and Greater Toronto and other cities and towns.

“We’re doing a visibility rally just to show people that we are in opposition to privatization of our health care,” said Patrick Hannon, co-chair of the Windsor Health Coalition.

The protest was held at the intersection of Tecumseh Road East and Ouellette Avenue.

In June, the provincial government announced $270-million for private clinics to deliver surgeries and diagnostic tests, with the aim of improving wait times.

There are also plans to fund up to 20,000 hip and knee surgeries to be delivered in private clinics, funded by OHIP, over two years.

“There are private clinics down here that cover everything through OHIP,” said Hannon. “Whenever public money is funneled to private interest for-profit, then we have a race. We have a race for other interested parties to build other health-care organizations to go and profit by it.”

Funding private clinics drains resources from public health care, said Hannon.

“When we take funding from the public health-care system, which is woefully underfunded to begin with, and then we put it into private clinics, we’re taking money away to give it to for-profit entities.”

In 2023, the province passed Bill 60, the Your Health Act, which recognized “the value of a health-care system that collaboratively integrates publicly funded, community-based health services with local and regional health system partners.”

According to the province’s website, about 85 per cent of patients seeking hip replacement surgery are seen within the target wait time for hip surgeries at the Windsor Regional Hospital’s Ouellette campus and 62 per cent are seen within the target wait time at the Metropolitan campus.

But private clinics are not subject to freedom-of-information requests, so their activities can’t be scrutinized in the way public institutions can be watched, said Hannon.

“Not only are they not publicly regulated with public elected boards, they also shield themselves from public scrutiny. Even the Ontario auditor general cannot audit the private entities.”

And the public health-care system will be left to handle the difficult surgeries, he said. Private clinics can pick and choose who they will accept, leaving the harder surgeries to the publicly funded health-care system, said Hannon.

He wants governments to provide more money to health care by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations.

“We’re looking for a realistic level of funding and not continuing to slash.”

In November, the Ford government said it had increased health-care spending by more than 31 per cent since 2018.

Click here for the original article