Coyne’s health analysis is off

Re: What exactly is Ontario Health? Andrew Coyne, March 12

As a former chief of service in a greater Toronto hospital with more than 30 years of front-line medical practice, it seems to me that Mr. Coyne’s analysis is neither grounded in actual health-care experience or fundamental economics.

He simplifies that long waits for care are due to inefficiencies due to lack of knowledge of costs. While many factors interact to produce greatly excessive waittimes, fundamentally the demand for care vastly exceeds the supply. This occurs because zero direct-cost to patients for insured services results in near endless demand.

Coyne attributes significant demand to the provision of unnecessary services resulting from fee- for- service payments to physicians, and recommends providing incentives to doctors to provide less care. This would clearly exacerbate wait times and ignores the underlying economic causes of insufficient acute- and long- term beds, home care and diagnostic services.

The government should

be lauded for renewing the organization of Ontario health-care which is clearly overly complex, disjointed, lacking in transparency and bureaucratically bloated, and ultimately lacking in focus about patients. Hopefully this reorganization represents the beginning of a sincere effort to bring better health-care to Ontarians within current constraints of a taxpayer-only funded system.

Stephen Sinclair, Richmond Hill, Ont.