Health Care Privatization is a Fool’s Errand

Canadians are understandably feeling a little anxious about health care these days. The past few years saw the Canadian health care system strain under the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. Doctors and nurses who did everything they could to keep our system afloat were being overworked amid the pandemic, leading to what the Canadian Medical Association referred to as “the Great Resignation.” In the years that followed, we all heard stories about, or were subject to, increased wait times, ER closures, delayed surgeries, and other serious issues within an already overburdened system. Most Canadians, understandably, just wanted their system to work. But a combination of exhaustion, corporate profit motives, and some unscrupulous provincial leaders have bent the word of the Canada Health Accord as far they could go towards privatization. And it’s going to cost us all unless Federal leadership steps up to stop it.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the door has already been open for private health care companies, and while there has always been some degree of private delivery of public health care, it’s ballooned in recent years, particularly in Conservative-run provinces. This growth in private, for-profit health care services has predominantly manifested in four distinct areas: diagnostics, such as MRI, CT, and blood test clinics; private surgical clinics, where people looking for life-changing but non-essential surgeries like knee surgery can pay to not have to wait months or years; virtual care access, essentially paying fees to private health care companies such as Maple to jump queue under the guise of redirecting patients to out-of-province doctors; and primary care clinics, who provide quick access for services for referrals and prescriptions.

In Ontario, for example, Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones have made a point of constantly highlighting all of the private, for-profit clinics they are funding with public money to do MRIs, hip and knee replacements, cataract surgeries, and endoscopies, among other procedures. But private companies don’t do these procedures out of the goodness of their heart, they do it to make money. And this is where health care costs start to balloon, to the detriment of public health services. Last fall, the CBC, though an access to information request, found that the Ontario government is giving for-profit clinics far more money than public hospitals for identical surgeries. The Don Mills Surgical Unit Ltd., a private surgical clinic who is part of Clearpoint Health Network, which counts former PC Health Minister Christine Elliott as a board member, was charging the province $1,264 per cataract surgery, double the cost for the same surgery in public health care facilities ($508) in 2021. Similarly, they were charging $4,037 for a knee arthroscopy, against the high end of $1,692 a public hospital would charge. These clinics are also luring medical professionals away from the public system with higher salaries. This goes to prove the fact that our current medical professionals are being underpaid and should be compensated fairly in order to ensure our health care system can be strengthened.

It's not about the nickels and dimes, though. It’s about the push to administer public health care through private clinics to starve an ailing public system to the point where it breaks. Alberta’s UCP government has been working to offload hospitals to Covenant Health, a Catholic health care provider, as they try to dismantle Alberta Health Services. BC Conservative leader John Rustad has promised a hybrid public-private health care system earlier this summer, and then proposed spending $3.2 billion less on health care than the current budget has allocated this year.

It's incumbent on federal leadership to ensure that the provinces are spending federal dollars allocated to them through the Canada Health Accord for public health care, but that’s not what’s happening. In fact, when NDP MP Gord Johns recently asked the Health committee to call on for-profit health care providers to testify at the committee, and that it undertake a study on the role of the private sector in Canada's public health care system, Conservative and Liberal MPs on the Committee voted against it.

Health care should never be a profit-driven industry. Medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. and emulating that failure here is a fool’s errand.