Who cares who cares?

The summer months have seen Ontario media crammed with stories about the supposed collapse of the Province's healthcare system.  A vanishingly small number of short-term emergency room shutdowns has been offered as evidence that the entire system is "on the brink".  An unholy alliance has sprung up almost overnight. Commentators on the left, led of course by the Toronto Star,  argue that the fault lies with the Doug Ford government, while those on the right want to see further privatization in order to ease pressure on the system.

As it happens, yours truly has had lots of exposure to the health care system in the last two months, as my wife has received a hip replacement.  There have been countless visits to hospitals, diagnostic centres, physios and such. There have been no issues at any stage of the process, and no signs of the burnout, staff morale problems and all the rest of it that we read about every single day.  It's dangerous to generalize from a single example, but if our experience in our very unfashionable small city is anything to go by, the health system remains resilient.

It's worth pointing out that the Ontario health system is by no means exclusively a public sector operation. Hospitals are public, but there is no public dental care whatsoever, eye care is a mixture of public and private, there is no pharmacare except for seniors and most diagnostic centres (blood tests and such) are privately operated. Wall-to-wall TV ads offering insurance for "the things your public health plan doesn't cover" offer all the evidence you need that the system is already far from comprehensive.

Be that as it may, the Ford government is not about to let a good crisis go to waste, and today unveiled a multi-part plan to relieve the pressure on the system. One element of the plan calls for allowing private clinics to offer a wider range of procedures while making sure that costs are still covered by OHIP, the Province's health care plan.

It's not at all clear why this would be a better or lower-cost option than simply increasing funding for the public system. At the start of this century I spent more than a decade living in the UK, which has a mixed public and private health care system. I could write a whole post about this, but one observation that's relevant here is that the private sector goes after the low-hanging fruit. They'll schedule you for a hip replacement if it looks likely to be a simple procedure, but if there's any risk of complications they'll boot you back to the nearest public hospital before your ass hits the gurney.  

Supporters of greater private sector involvement in health care point to a variety of countries that have a blended system and deliver better outcomes than Canada at a lower cost; France and Spain are two regularly cited examples. Fair enough, but does anyone really believe that opening up the Ontario health system to private money would move us in that direction? Far more likely that an influx of money and methods from across the border to our south would push up costs and rapidly erode the equal access that we currently enjoy. I'll take a pass, thanks.