![](\"https:\/\/breachmedia.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/conservative_healthcare-e1644511895468.jpg\")
<\/p>\n(Feb 10 2022)<\/p>\n
By: Dan Darrah, The Breach<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew as soon as I heard the voice of the doctor\u2019s assistant,\u201d Vicky Stewart recalls.<\/p>\n
In December, she got the call that her husband John\u2019s surgery had been cancelled.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was awful,\u201d she says. John was diagnosed with Parkinson\u2019s a decade ago and had been waiting for three years for deep brain stimulation, a major operation that could radically improve his quality of life.<\/p>\n
He takes around 40 pills a day, Vicky says, and between his tremors and falls and frequent hospital visits, life has been an \u201cemotional rollercoaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
A month later, in January, his rescheduled surgery was cancelled again\u2014thanks to pandemic-related staff shortages in their hospital near Waterford, Ontario.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not mad at the hospital,\u201d says Stewart, who works in hospital administration. \u201cIt\u2019s just an unfortunate circumstance.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Stewarts aren\u2019t alone. With hospitals overstretched by COVID-19, surgery backlogs across the country have soared. In the first year of the pandemic, more than a half-million fewer surgeries were performed\u00a0compared<\/a>\u00a0to 2019.<\/p>\n In Ontario alone, delayed treatment has\u00a0been tied<\/a>\u00a0to 4,000 deaths.<\/p>\n With demand straining the public health-care system, the conservative-led provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan are pursuing a contentious tactic to clear their backlogs: tapping private providers to do the surgeries, and paying them from the public purse.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a plan Alberta was already pursuing before the pandemic. But health advocates are warning that Conservative governments appear to now be seizing on a crisis to advance a long-standing right-wing agenda of health care privatization. Could this be a stealth stepping stone to two-tier health care, where only those who can afford it get the attention they need?<\/p>\n Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliot speaking at a Long Term Care construction site in Ajax, Ontario, on Tuesday, February 1, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n When Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliot\u00a0revealed<\/a>\u00a0her government\u2019s intention to hand over more surgeries and treatments to private companies in a press conference last week, she caught health advocates off guard.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bombshell announcement,\u201d says Natalie Mehra, president of the Ontario Health Coalition. \u201cAnd it\u2019s one that we are going to fight with everything we have.\u201d<\/p>\n As a first-of-its-kind policy in Ontario, Mehra says that allowing private clinics to operate as more fully-fledged private hospitals would be \u201cdevastating,\u201d potentially paving the way for erosion of public healthcare.<\/p>\n Ontario\u2019s surgery backlog isn\u2019t precisely known, but experts\u00a0say<\/a>\u00a0that under the current capacity it could take up to two years to catch up on delayed appointments and treatments.<\/p>\n \u201cIT\u2019S PRIVATIZATION ON A SCALE THAT NO GOVERNMENT IN ONTARIO HAS EVER CONTEMPLATED.\u201d<\/p>\n Natalie Mehra, president of the Ontario Health Coalition<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The Progressive Conservative government, which has made broader cuts to healthcare and has pursued further privatization in long-term and home care, introduced changes in 2021 to enlist private clinics for more operations and opened the door to privatized eye surgeries.<\/p>\n But with these new changes, private clinics\u2014which currently only provide a few simple \u201cday\u201d surgeries\u2014would likely have an even broader mandate for private operations. That could mean inpatient beds, overnight surgeries, and a whole range of operations they can\u2019t provide now.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s privatization on a scale that no government in Ontario has ever contemplated,\u201d Mehra says.<\/p>\n Saskatchewan is following suit. Facing a backlog of around 35,000 surgeries, the right-wing government of Scott Moe plans to\u00a0cede certain procedures<\/a>\u00a0to the private sector. It\u2019s still deciding which ones, and whether the changes will be permanent.<\/p>\n And in Alberta, where Jason Kenney\u2019s United Conservative Party has made for-profit healthcare part of their party\u2019s platform, the threat is even more advanced.<\/p>\n The province recently partnered with private clinics to begin\u00a0outsourcing<\/a>\u00a0eye surgeries, and is in the early stages of doing the same with orthopedic surgeries\u2014part of a broader privatization agenda that has seen Kenney\u00a0sell off public labs<\/a>, home care, and\u00a0laundry services<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two years ago, the passage of Bill 30 put into motion the Alberta government\u2019s\u00a0goal<\/a>\u00a0of privatizing up to 30 per cent of surgeries by 2023.<\/p>\n Physicians Dr. Danyaal Raza and Dr. Thara Kumar\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the omnibus legislation potentially \u201cone of the biggest moves towards investor-driven, for-profit health care, in the history of medicare.\u201d<\/p>\n While it doesn\u2019t explicitly privatize surgeries, National Union of Public and General Employees researcher Andrew Longhurst\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0the bill\u2019s cloudy language will help create favourable conditions for private companies to get a permanent foothold in Alberta\u2019s public health care system.<\/p>\n \u201cFor every public dollar that we put into private delivery, we\u2019re getting like 90 cents worth of value,\u201d says Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta. \u201cBecause there has to be profits, or private companies have no reason to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Private companies often promise \u201cefficiency\u201d for taxpayers, but critics\u00a0point to<\/a>\u00a0cost overruns, reduced hours of service, lack of transparency, no improvements to wait times, poorer outcomes, and outrageous bonuses for executives.<\/p>\n The consequences of private care can also ricochet throughout the public sector.<\/p>\n The Nova Scotia Health Coalition\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0\u201cresearch overwhelmingly shows that introducing private, pay-to-use services actually increases wait times in the public system by siphoning off medical staff.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Smith and the Ontario Health Coalition\u2019s Mehra say private clinics end up taking on easier\u2014and therefore more profitable\u2014surgeries, leaving the more complex ones to the public sector.<\/p>\n With fewer resources and less staff, it\u2019s a scenario that could see patients like John Stewart waiting even longer for medical attention.<\/p>\n Health advocates warn that bringing for-profit companies into health care systems also opens the door to user fees, leading to two-tier health care where those who can afford it can pay to skip the line\u2014the long-time goal of Kenney\u2019s UCP.<\/p>\n In Alberta, private surgeries\u2014and clinics more generally\u2014expanded<\/a>\u00a0under Ralph Klein, the province\u2019s premier from 1992 until 2006.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had [for] at least 30 years an ideology that has been bent on promoting private delivery,\u201d says Smith, explaining the Klein years promoted the idea that \u201cgovernment should be out of anything that the private sector can deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n She says the contemporary UCP holds the same philosophy but \u201con steroids.\u201d<\/p>\n After Klein closed public hospitals, Calgary\u2019s for-profit Health Resource Center began performing publicly-funded knee and hip replacements.<\/p>\n Some of these surgeries\u00a0cost<\/a>\u00a0the government as much as 32 per cent more than the same surgeries offered through the Alberta Health Services.<\/p>\n In 2010, the hospital filed for bankruptcy. But because Albertans had become dependent on that hospital\u2019s role in the system, the government\u00a0pursued<\/a>\u00a0an expensive government bailout to keep it going.<\/p>\n \u201c[Private companies] depend on the public system: having their bills paid, and paying for their profits,\u201d Smith says. \u201cAnd if that doesn\u2019t happen, then they don\u2019t succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n These mixed results raise the question if public money would be better spent simply expanding public health care, where money doesn\u2019t need to be allocated to profit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want public,\u201d Smith says. \u201cNot just public dollars. We want public delivery.\u201d<\/p>\n The prairie provinces might have experienced it most intensely, but all Canadian jurisdictions have felt the push for privatization for decades.<\/p>\n Following corporate pressure, federal spending cuts in the 1980s and \u201890s reduced capacity and kicked the door open for the private sector to take over aspects of health care provision.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/breachmedia.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/ChristineElliott_PrivateHospitals-1280x720.png\")
<\/p>\nA \u201cbombshell announcement\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Private health provision \u201con steroids\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Reviving the public system\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n