For the debate on health care!
Here's what's influencing Ontario health-care policy By Michele Landsberg The Star Oct. 20, 2002. IF PUBLIC policies don�t seem to make sense to you, then you�re just not paying attention. Everything that seems downright irrational, wasteful, destructive and reckless in the Ontario government�s approach to health care really does make sense if you consider all the available information. For example: For-profit hospitals are a medical danger zone. A study done at McMaster medical school showed that death rates are higher at for-profit hospitals, which must wring their profits out of health care by skimping on skilled staff. Private-profit hospitals, they showed, cut their expenditures by 10 to 15 per cent. Some patients pay with their lives. And yet Health Minister Tony Clement is pushing ahead with the building of two for-profit hospitals in Brampton and Ottawa. Senseless? No. Stay tuned for a very commonsensical explanation. Another example: If it makes you a little queasy to think of being in a life-and-death situation while hospital management calculates how much money it can skim from your treatment, just consider this. The first private-public-partnership hospital built in Britain was so shoddily constructed that sewage flooded the operating room and ceilings collapsed in the maternity unit. Meanwhile, beds were cut by 30 per cent and clinical staff budgets by 20 per cent. Doesn�t make sense yet? Wait, it will. For-profit health care is costlier to the public and does not eliminate waiting lists. Prime example: the privatized cancer-care clinic at Sunnybrook. No less an observer than the provincial auditor said that waiting lists were not shortened and the costs to the public were higher. Home care in Ontario is the most privatized in Canada. I don�t have to repeat here the litany of ugliness: Plummeting standards, shrinking staff, lowest quality of care and least amount of rehab and nursing care, and yet Ontario has the oldest and sickest patients in long-term care in the country. And the costs for this accommodation are among Canada�s highest. The once-public labs in our hospitals have disappeared into the giant maw of the private lab industry. Anyone notice any decrease in public costs or improvement in service? So how can all this mess be an example of rational decision-making? Scholars like York University political scientist Robert MacDermid as well as the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) have long pored over the public records to find the explanation. You could sum it up with a gaggle of old folk wisdom: He who pays the piper, calls the tune. You scratch my back, I�ll scratch yours. Where there�s smoke, there�s fire. Look at the record of campaign contributions to the Ontario Conservatives between 1995 and 1999. MacDermid pointed out last year, in an interview with CBC�s Marketplace, that one big long-term care company, CPL REIT (owned, he said, by the Reichmans) gave more than $22,000 to the Tories and received contracts to build 1,667 beds, with a potential of $1.3 billion in government subsidies over 20 years. Smart investing. The same was true of nursing home giant Extendicare ($36,727) which got contracts worth $700 million in the long run. More recently, NUPGE took a beady-eyed look at donations to the leadership campaigns of Premier Ernie Eves and Clement. It�s all a matter of public record: some of the juiciest gifts to Eves� campaign were from the private health-care sector. The Dynacare Health Group, the largest private laboratory company in Ontario, gave Eves $25,000. RBC Dominion Securities� Tony Fell, the privatizing chair of the University Health Network, coughed up $10,000. Canadian Medical Laboratories Ltd., which provides lab tests and medical imaging services (private MRI clinics, anyone?) gave $10,000. Clement, as the health minister who says he �makes no apology on the issue of for-profit versus not-for-profit,� was rolling in unapologetic donations from private medical industries. KMH Cardiology and Diagnostic Centres (private testing and lab work) gave $11,000. Gamma-Dynacare Medical Labs covered all its bases by giving $10,000 to Clement on top of the money it gave to Eves. A very handsome $43,568 came from Olympia and York Properties, a major shareholder in Retirement Residences Real Estate Investment Trust (Ernie Eves, former trustee), which has 185 facilities. Central Park Lodges and Versa-Care (which kicked in a separate $5,000) are divisions of the trust. The list of pharmaceutical companies that donated to Clements� campaign is headed by GlaxoSmithKline for $11,620. The cash total from pharmaceuticals and drug store chains was $70,520. The list goes on and on � optometrists, eye laser clinics, medical equipment manufacturers, Nestle Corporation�s vision care labs. Money talks, and privatized medical care has the loudest voice in this race to undermine medicare before the Romanow Commission can make its report next month. Democracy isn�t supposed to work this way. We�re all supposed to be on an equal footing in choosing our governments and our way of life. �Medicare was a huge victory for the public will,� commented Mike Luff, national representative of NUPGE. �The doctors, the drug companies, the insurance companies all fought it, but the people wanted it and won." Now, however, some of those wealthy privatizing interests, having once lost the battle to stymie medicare, are trying a quieter, back-door route. We're at fault, too: we've all become so accustomed to this potentially corrupt process that many of us are too cynical to bother fighting it. There's been far more flap � constant headline stories and letters to the editor, in fact � about the expense account sleaze of steak-chomping Tory MPPs than there has been about the far more fundamental scandal of big corporate money used to skew public policies in the hopes of private profit. There is an antidote to this enervating cycle of disillusion and apathy. Dozens of citizen groups are now organizing, using the Internet to publish their bracing and figures, and rallying citizens to fight back while there's still a chance. For a healing jolt of informed activism, check into http://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca or http://www.nupge.ca and do a search for "Ernie Eves" or, for a scary report on the privatizing giants, called "Waiting in the Wings," see http://www.polarisinstitute.org/ Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star Saturday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
