Well being-care employees and supporters collect outdoors of Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith’s workplace on Chemong Highway Tuesday. They held a rally organized by the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions and the Canadian Union of Public Workers. (Picture: Sebastian Johntson-Lindsay)
This text initially appeared within the Ontario Chronicle on July 30, 2024 and is reprinted right here by means of a artistic commons license.
Roughly 60 health-care employees and supporters gathered outdoors of Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith’s workplace on Chemong Highway Tuesday for a rally organized by the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) and the Canadian Union of Public Workers.
The rally marks the finish of a month-long marketing campaign which has seen health-care employees and OCHU executives rally outdoors of MPP workplaces in 12 communities throughout Ontario to protest what they describe because the rising privatization of well being care in Ontario below the Doug Ford authorities and the growth of a “two-tier” health-care system.
The employees are additionally aiming to name consideration to an April 2024 Ontario Well being Coalition report which discovered situations of what it alleges are unlawful billing practices by non-public clinics alongside situations of physicians “upselling” expedited companies and pointless exams and procedures for situations reminiscent of cataracts.
The rally featured a lineup of speeches from CUPE health-care employees, together with Charlene Van Dyk of CUPE Native 6364, which represents employees from Lakeridge Well being Company.
“The Conservatives want to privatize our hospitals,” Van Dyk informed the gang. “The goal of private health care is to maximize profits. Investors don’t put their money in health care because it’s some humanitarian impulse — they do it because they want return on that investment.”
Sharon Richer (left) speaks to healthcare employees and supporters gathered outdoors of Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith’s workplace on Chemong Highway Tuesday. (Picture: Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay)
Van Dyk, who additionally serves as vice chair of the health-care employees co-ordinating committee at CUPE Ontario, continued on, stating that health-care employees in Ontario “have a profound belief in a public health-care system that treats people as human beings and does not discriminate based on their ability to pay together in solidarity with each other.”
Member and appearing president of CUPE Native 1943 at Peterborough Regional Well being Centre (PRHC), Lisa Barker, used her speech to problem the Ford authorities’s claims of getting added nurses to the Ontario health-care system.
“They don’t tell us the number of nurses who’ve left the system,” Barker stated, noting that in response to the latest knowledge launched by the Registered Sensible Nurses Affiliation, Ontario added 1,700 nurses final yr, however misplaced 2,100, that means there was a internet lack of 400 nurses within the province.
Barker additionally challenged the concept touted by the Ford authorities that privatization below Invoice 60, or the Your Well being Act, is bettering wait occasions. Citing cataract surgical procedures for example, Barker claimed that Ontario lagged behind different provinces with solely 59 % of cataract surgical procedures being carried out in a well timed method within the province in comparison with the 66 % nationwide common.
Then, Barker stated, there may be the price of privatization as she famous that “the Ontario Health Coalitionhas shown that privatization of cataract surgeries … cost 56 percent more than the same procedure done in our public hospitals.”
MPP Smith was in Toronto on Tuesday attending to issues associated to his position as parliamentary assistant to the minister of finance. Reached for remark, Smith stated in an electronic mail Tuesday morning that he has not learn the Ontario Well being Coalition report and subsequently can not touch upon it immediately.
Nevertheless, Smith famous that if any of his constituents really feel they’ve paid for a service that ought to have been coated by OHIP he encourages them to file an attraction and attain out to his workplace for help in doing so.
In response to the allegations of making a two-tier system in Ontario which permits for these with larger assets to entry companies quicker, Smith said that the federal government is “leveraging the existing network of health-care professionals to reduce those wait times.”
“It’s about providing people with the care they need, when they need it and where they need it,” Smith continued, noting {that a} prime instance of that is with cataract surgical procedures.
Smith defined that the system has been in a position to present greater than 700,000 surgical procedures since permitting ophthalmologists to carry out the process in their very own clinics as an alternative of permitting them to make use of solely hospital working rooms.
“The clinics are more able to work around an individual’s schedule with times available in the evenings and weekends,” he added.
Regardless of this, Sharon Richer, the secretary-treasurer of OCHU claims there’s a sample of exploitation, particularly of senior sufferers, who’re being informed that with a purpose to get a faster date for a cataract surgical procedure they must pay to keep away from shedding their driver’s licence or one other damaging consequence of residing with a situation that requires essential remedy.
The issue for Richer comes all the way down to underfunding of the general public system with a purpose to drive individuals over to the non-public clinics.
“They’re taking money out of the public system and they’re creating chaos,” Richer stated following the rally. “Then they’re saying ‘We have a solution’.”
“(Access) shouldn’t be based on if (you) can afford it, it should be based on need and that’s what Ontarians and Canadians want for our public health system,” she stated.
