Simcoe County Health Coalition

Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Social Policy,

The Simcoe County Health Coalition expresses profound disagreement with the government’s plan to close public hospital services and expand private clinics. 

The use of private clinics as a way to solve our current healthcare crisis is simply not supported by evidence. In fact, there is a significant body of academic research showing that private clinics are plagued by poor quality, safety concerns, higher user fees, cream-skimming of the most profitable and easiest cases at the expense of local hospitals, higher costs, and a host of other problems associated with the fragmenting of community public hospital services into private clinics.

We also hold that Bill 60 is deeply flawed and that its rapid passage through the legislature without proper consultation and debate is extremely problematic and undemocratic.

Bill 60 would reduce the transparency and accountability of the medical system in Ontario, and it would do so without having any substantial consultation with any patient advocacy group. The public and the Legislature will have no meaningful input. There is nothing to stop for-profit privatization of our core public hospital services, in fact, this is what the legislation appears to be designed to do. Similarly, this law does not contemplate quality standards. There is no oversight in the legislation; it is left to the discretion of unnamed third parties and/or regulations. 

We are not satisfied that Bill 60 will remedy the continuing decline in quality of care, nor that it will reduce wait times. Rather, by loosening restrictions on private clinics, it will continue to disincentivize nurses from remaining in the public system and lower the quality standards of care. Bill 60 does not include any real protection against staff poaching from our local public hospitals.

There must be transparency in our healthcare, and yet Bill 60 provides no standards for making these new clinics’ operating plans or their compliance history available through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Rather, it explicitly exempts these clinics from such transparency requirements and accountability. Similarly, there is no protection against corruption and conflict of interest; in fact, the legislation opens the door widely for new avenues of conflict-of-interest.

We find it problematic that within Bill 60, these privately run clinics are referred to as “Integrated Community Health Service Centres” when Ontario already has a network of publicly administered Community Health Centres which are accountable to the Ministry of Health. We see this as a purposeful attempt to confuse the public.

We are also very concerned with the schedule included in this law that deregulates a range of health care staff, from physicians, through nurses, to health professionals, not only in the private clinics but also in other parts of health care. The implications are significant. For example, the restrictions on who can do surgeries, be Medical Directors in long-term care homes, assess patients and residents, bill OHIP, dispense narcotics, restrain a resident in a long-term care home or operate an x-ray machine which produces radiation have been deregulated and left to new regulations that have not been disclosed to the public.

Under successive governments medium sized – and especially rural – hospitals’ services have been continually cut, downgraded and even closed. Maternity, acute care, emergency rooms, mammography, surgeries, diagnostics, physiotherapy, laboratories and a host of other vital care services have been moved out of rural towns. This model has already, and will continue to, remove procedures and funding from local communities and centralize them into high-volume centres, forcing many patients in our community to travel further. For-profit privatization of our hospital services takes away funding and resources from all local public hospitals and will be particularly devastating to smaller and rural communities like ours.

We advocate for a reinvestment in public health care that reflects our public need and is equitable to other provinces’ investment, for quality assurance and regulation of healthcare facilities, and for full support for the healthcare workers of our public care.

In conclusion, Bill 60 inherently removes protections that ensure the quality and integrity which Simcoe County residents have come to expect from our medical system, and we express our firm opposition.