Doug Ford’s private health-care plan is the beginning of the end of medicare, critics charge

Pushing back against the Ford government’s new health reform legislation, opposition parties say more for-profit clinics means care will grow more costly as thousands of surgeries and diagnostics are moved out of hospitals to ease long wait-lists.

Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones were on the defensive Wednesday over the proposed Your Health Act, which would clear the way for more for-profit clinics to provide cataract and other surgeries and diagnostics like CT scans and MRIs — all paid by OHIP.

New Democrat Leader Marit Stiles accused the government of using the “crisis” in hospitals as an excuse to expand for-profit care with “two-tier, investor-driven” clinics that will provide a mix of care, some covered by provincial health and some not.

Jones said expanding the involvement of more for-profit and not-for-profit clinics in Ontario health care is the best prescription to tackle wait times that surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and leave hospitals free for more complex care.

“Innovation is not a bad word,” she told MPPs in the legislature’s question period a day after the act was introduced, noting there are for-profit providers in Ontario’s health-care system, including X-ray clinics, medical labs and some eye clinics.

The government is “expanding what is already in place … to serve the patient better.”

The government’s plan, first announced in January, includes using private clinics in Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa to do thousands more cataract surgeries this year, shortening wait-lists by months with patients paying with their OHIP cards for basic lenses.

Hip and knee replacements could be done in private clinics starting next year to further “take the burden off hospitals,” Ford said.

But rival parties insisted that allowing the number of for-profit clinics to grow is a dangerous step.

Jones will call for applications for clinics — be they for-profit or not-for-profit — later this year to meet local demand for services across the province, concentrating on areas where wait-lists are longest. It’s not known how many new clinics will be approved.

“I agree, we do have to get innovative,” said Liberal MPP Dr. Adil Shamji (Don Valley East), an emergency room physician. “That, to me, does not equate to profiteering, that does not equate to corporatization of our health-care system.”

Shamji said this is why a Liberal campaign promise in last June’s provincial election called for more not-for-profit clinics to take the strain off hospitals.

“We are not against the idea in principle. What we are against is profiteering and creating a runway for corporate interests to come in and upsell patients, upcharge patients.”

Stiles said the built-in profit margins given to private clinics will take money away from health care that could otherwise be used by the public system, and called on the government to provide more funding to hospitals to open unused operating rooms.

“I do think it is the beginning of the dismantling of medicare,” she said of the government plan. “It is the establishment of two-tier health care in this province … a system where some people will be able to pay for a different kind of access or a different level of care than other people.”

For the Greens, party leader Mike Schreiner maintained “expanding for-profit health care is going to cost us more and deliver less.”

Advocates of moving certain surgeries and diagnostic procedures of hospitals say specialized clinics can treat more patients quickly at lower cost, with shorter turnaround times between patients.

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