TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Ford government’s plans to privatize our public hospitals’ vital services are a fatal threat to the core tenet of Canadian Public Medicare that extra user fees are forbidden and patients will not be faced with user charges in their time of need. Already existing private for-profit clinics routinely extra-bill patients thousands of dollars, often illegally, as well as charging patients hundreds or thousands of dollars for extra medically unnecessary add-ons. Moreover, private clinics take scarce staff out of public hospitals to serve lighter-care profitable patients, leaving those with more complex care needs to public hospitals with less funding and staffing to provide for them. This, in the context of an unprecedented staffing shortage is a reckless and damaging idea, warned the Ontario Health Coalition.
“What Ford announced today is a fatal threat to our public health care system,” said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition which has for decades been on the front-lines of advocating to protect patients. “If they turn over a significant portion of our public hospitals’ surgeries to for-profits, we will not be able to protect patients against extra charges of thousands of dollars for needed care and from manipulative extra upselling. The fact is that no one has been able to control the private for-profit clinics where they have sprung up in Canada, and Ontario has done a particularly terrible job...
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