Next steps in the fight to save public healthcare

The all-out assault on public health care took a dangerous step forward with Alberta’s Bill 11 coming into effect on September 1st. According to Chris Gallaway from Friends of Medicare in Alberta, the Bill “is an existential threat to the whole idea of single-payer public health care in Canada”. It brings in “dual practice”, allowing physicians to operate in the public and private systems at the same time, making decisions patient by patient. Dual practice, Gallaway adds, is just a rebranding of 2-tier U.S. style healthcare where wait times are determined by what you can afford.

 

Tommy Douglas must be turning in his grave.  But despite Premier Danielle Smith’s concerted attacks, Friends of Medicare in Alberta is doubling down on their fight to save public health care, embarking on an ambitious campaign to mobilize opposition to the bill across the province. This campaign is buoyed both by a recent public opinion poll showing that 86% of Albertans believe universal health care should be based on need, not ability to pay, and by a surprise victory for the NDP in a by-election in Calgary-Shaw, a conservative stronghold.

 

While the attack is starting in Alberta, it will ripple across the country. Doug Ford will be emboldened as he continues to accelerate privatization and for-profit care in Ontario, starving public hospitals while they pour millions into for-profit clinics. Dozens of for-profit clinics are coming online as public hospitals are forced into deficit. Surgeries and procedures that were done in public hospitals are being shifted to for-profit clinics with staff and resources stolen from the public system. People are being upsold and charged for services that are covered by our public system.

 

The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) published a report tracking the past 5 years of increasing privatization and defunding of public hospitals under the Ford government:

“Every public interest group out here told the Ford government that the private clinics would simply be poaching from the staff and resources of public hospitals. Now, after five years, it is clear that the private clinics have slowed down addressing wait lists, not sped them up, delaying increased volumes literally for years. The evidence shows that the government used our public money for redundant equipment and facilities. It shows that private clinics have brought in new user fees and extra-billing, queue jumping and other practices that are supposed to be illegal, and yet the Ford government has not fined them nor pulled their licenses. And, the evidence shows that the private clinics have increased geographic inequities in health care services as well as inequities between the wealthy and everyone else in terms of access to care.”

 

OHC and local coalitions are organizing emergency town halls to renew and strengthen the fight against privatization. The Greater Toronto Health Coalition’s town hall panel included Natalie Mehra, Executive Director of OHC, Chris Gallaway from Alberta’s Friends of Medicare, council member Bradley Moonias from the Neskantaga First Nation, and a GTA paramedic.

 

People highlighted the urgency of the crisis and underlined how the conditions of work for health care workers, including increasing layoffs and understaffing, are reflected in worsening access to health care for patients.

 

Councillor Moonias highlighted the lack of access to health care for many Indigenous Nations, including in Neskantaga where the only medical clinic has closed twice because of flooding and raw sewage due to improper upgrades. 260 people have been evacuated to Toronto until the issue is resolved.

 

It’s clear that only a united fight of all our forces can push back against the drive to privatization for the profit of the few at the expense of free public health care for all. We will go up or down together.

 

Natalie Mehra announced at the Toronto town hall the plan to build an On to Ottawa Trek for November 27-28, with a mass rally on Parliament Hill on Saturday November 28.

 

We need to fill buses, trains, cars to travel to Ottawa to stand together and demand that Carney’s Liberal government uphold the Canada Health Act. Under the act, people living in Canada must have reasonable access to required health services. The services are to be provided on the same terms and without patient charges.

 

Carney is fond of using the phrase ‘Elbows up’. So far that has meant very little in terms of defending the actual rights of people to access public health care. He has said not one word against the privatization pushed through in Alberta or the same processes happening in provinces like Ontario and Saskatchewan.

 

We need elbows up against US style privatization, private insurance companies and private clinic profiteers, be they American or Canadian.