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The Ontario Ministry of Health is a huge institution with a broad range of responsibilities. To make things even more complicated, health is a joint federal-provincial responsibility, with both governments pulling purse strings every which way. This section is a general look at a few of the big issues. The links below should provide you with more detailed information if you want it. No government in its right mind would abolish Medicare. I don't think the Tories would do that, not right now anyway. At the same time, I get the feeling they keep the public system going because they have to, not because they have any real commitment to it. Ralph Nader has suggested that Canadian provincial governments are sabotaging their own health-care systems to create public pressure for privatization, and Lord, do I believe it. On the positive side, the government has finally started to heed research that suggests Medicare should operate as a more cohesive, integrated system. They also plan to focus on improving health outcomes through research, which is laudable. On the puzzling side, this year the Ontario Ministry of Health stated that the new function of the ministry should be to "manage" the health-care system, rather than provide services. Does that mean the Tories want a health system run by private companies, with the government acting as overseer? I wouldn't put it past them. In an unprecedented action, the Ontario government has ordered that one third of home-care contracts are to go to private bidders. Traditionally these contracts go to non-profit organizations like the VON or St Elizabeth Health Care. Now any surpluses home-care companies create will be sucked away as corporate profit, instead of being reinvested in the health care system. You may have heard that in 1997-98 the Harris government spent $18.7-billion on the Ministry of Health, which the Tories say is more than any other government has in Ontario history. With typical Tory sneakiness, though, they have given us a number that is not adjusted for inflation and population increase. When you take those factors into account, real health spending per person has not increased. In reality, the Tories have cut health spending massively. $800-million has been taken out of hospitals alone, people. Any extra money is being doled out over several years or is being absorbed by "restructuring costs." The Tories are lying through their teeth when they say they have increased health spending. Their approach to health-care management has revealed the Tories to be idiotically ambitious people with a fatal love for grandiose plans. When it comes to any kind of "restructuring", Mike Harris basically does as much damage as he can, and then he comes up with enough band-aid solutions to reassure the public and hopefully get himself re-elected. Anyway, the Tories have saved their clumsiest tactics for hospitals. We were promised that no hospitals would close without community health services being put in place. Well, 30 hospitals are supposed to close, and the community services in place are clearly inadequate. Furthermore, patients are being shunted around as services are being eliminated from one hospital and consolidated in another. This is particularly bad for psychiatric patients who are being put in institutions that can't handle them. Mike Harris has called for complete provincial control over health care. Presumably he'd like this because then his government could do whatever the heck they wanted, without having the feds complaining about human rights and universal access. This remains a distant dream, as the Canada Health Act isn't going to be scrapped any time soon. The Tories don't really have the tools to do away with universal health care. They do have the tools, however, to damage the system and to undermine public confidence.
Health LinksOntario Ministry of Health |