{"id":28730,"date":"2023-05-25T22:19:53","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T02:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca\/?p=28730"},"modified":"2023-06-24T22:20:21","modified_gmt":"2023-06-25T02:20:21","slug":"ontario-health-coalition-gears-up-for-referendum-against-private-clinics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca\/index.php\/ontario-health-coalition-gears-up-for-referendum-against-private-clinics\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontario Health Coalition gears up for referendum against private clinics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(May 24, 2023)<\/p>\n<p>By: Darren Taylor, Newmarket Today<\/p>\n<p>Citizen vote to be held May 26 and 27 on Ford government\u2019s Bill 60, which privatizes public hospital services, OHC spokesperson says<\/p>\n<p>The Ontario Health Coalition is urging residents across the\u00a0province\u00a0to cast a ballot in favour of maintaining a single-tier publicly funded health-care system.<\/p>\n<p>The OHC will be holding a citizen-run referendum May 26 and 27 online and at hundreds of locations\u00a0in protest of the Ontario government\u2019s Bill 60.<\/p>\n<p>The province says the legislation will allow private clinics to perform procedures such as knee replacements, hip replacements and cataract surgery to cut long wait lists for care.<\/p>\n<p>The question on the ballot will be: &#8220;Do you want our public hospital services to be privatized to for-profit hospitals and clinics?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s fundamentally undemocratic. Nobody voted for this,\u201d said Al Dupuis, an Ontario Health Coalition spokesperson for the Algoma District<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot only are we losing our single-tier health-care system with this legislation with the privatization of these services,\u00a0but we didn\u2019t ask that they be taken from us in this way,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>Government officials, including Premier Doug Ford, have stated that Ontarians will be able to pay for procedures at private clinics with their OHIP cards and not their credit cards.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is misleading,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe know by way of research that the Ontario Health Coalition has done and corroborated by other media sources that in many of these private clinics that already exist, especially in other provinces, that there is up-selling, that there is queue jumping if people want to pay extra, that there is up-sold services or extra user fees, there\u2019s all kinds of this sort of thing happening.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dupuis said the OHC agrees with an April 2023 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in which the court dismissed an appeal by British Columbia Dr. Brian Day to allow patients to go to private clinics in the face of long wait times for services.<\/p>\n<p>While Day argued that long wait times for medical procedures violate Charter rights, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld universal public health care.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe know that some people, some of the time, will be able to get their services with their OHIP card, but the premier knows very well that these clinics are very problematic and that we\u2019ve never been able to properly regulate them and there are known to be many violations of the Canada Health Act because of it,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>Dupuis said that the OHC has received reports of individuals in Ontario being asked to pay extra to receive services sooner.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is not supposed to be legal under the Canada Health Act because you\u2019re not supposed to be charged for medically necessary services. So the claim that you\u2019re going to be able to pay with your OHIP card is false because of the extent to which it\u2019s been documented already,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>The OHC says that measures such as implementing Bill 60 could be avoided simply by spending more money on the existing publicly funded health-care system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t need these extra clinics to clear the backlogs,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have operating rooms in many \u2014\u00a0in fact most \u2014\u00a0major hospitals in Ontario, that are closed at four o\u2019clock in the afternoon or not open on weekends or are closed permanently because the province refuses to fund them and staff them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dupuis said that as of Friday, 100,000 votes had already been cast in the OHC referendum online and that other people had voted at advance polls.<\/p>\n<p>Voters will be asked to prove they are 16 years of age or older, a resident of Ontario and to vote only once.<\/p>\n<p>While there are no voting locations in York Region, you can vote online\u00a0on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publichospitalvote.ca\/?utm_source=newmarkettoday.ca&amp;utm_campaign=newmarkettoday.ca%3A%20outbound&amp;utm_medium=referral\">OHC website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The ballots and total provincial results will be released in Toronto outside the Ontario Legislature at noon\u00a0on Wednesday, May 31.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re doing this referendum to introduce a little bit of democracy where there hasn\u2019t been any, to give people a chance to decide for themselves whether or not they think our hospital services should be privatized,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>Voting hours will vary depending on the number and availability of OHC volunteers at the ballot boxes as well as the store hours where the ballot boxes are located.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe just have to open operating rooms for a few hours extra, daily and on weekends, and we would get rid of the backlog in a fairly short period of time,\u201d Dupuis said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe infrastructure is there but the government is choosing not to fund the infrastructure that is existing in the public system to deal with the backlogs, neither are they making the necessary steps to get the recruitment where it needs to be for nursing staff.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newmarkettoday.ca\/local-news\/ontario-health-coalition-gears-up-for-referendum-against-private-clinics-7043127\">Link to original article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(May 24, 2023) By: Darren Taylor, Newmarket Today Citizen vote to be held May 26 and 27 on Ford government\u2019s Bill 60, which privatizes public hospital services, OHC spokesperson says The Ontario Health Coalition is urging residents across the\u00a0province\u00a0to cast a ballot in favour of maintaining a single-tier publicly funded health-care system. The OHC will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ohc-in-the-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ontario Health Coalition gears up for referendum against private clinics - Ontario Health Coalition<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(May 24, 2023) By: Darren Taylor, Newmarket Today Citizen vote to be held May 26 and 27 on Ford government\u2019s Bill 60, which privatizes public hospital\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca\/index.php\/ontario-health-coalition-gears-up-for-referendum-against-private-clinics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ontario Health Coalition gears up for referendum against private clinics - 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