Health care in Ontario among most expensive

After almost 14 years of Liberal government in Ontario — first under Dalton McGuinty and now Kathleen Wynne — Health Minister Eric Hoskins is worried the province’s health-care system may not be financially sustainable.

That’s like someone killing both his parents and asking the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.

Under the Liberals, Ontario has one of the world’s most expensive health care systems, costing taxpayers $51.8 billion annually — 42.4 per cent of all government program spending — that delivers mediocre health care outcomes compared to international norms.

We have fewer doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita than countries with less expensive health care systems that produce better medical results.

Hundreds of thousands of Ontarians don’t have a family doctor, emergency rooms are crowded and wait times for treatment are longer than international norms.

Just about the only thing Ontario is a world leader at in health care is giving jobs, money and power to bureaucrats, who have built upon a decade of past failures to screw up the health-care system even more.

In their latest example of jawdroppingly bad decision-making, Hoskins is expanding the role of health-care bureaucracies the Liberals created in 2006 known as Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs), responsible for half of all health care spending in Ontario.

This even though auditor general Bonnie Lysyk warned them in her 2015 annual report that the LHINs were doing a poor job of meeting performance standards.

Worse, Lysyk wrote: “Our audit found that the (Health) Ministry has not clearly defined the attributes of an ‘integrated health system,’ nor does it have any way to measure how effective LHINs are as planners, funders and integrators of health care. This makes it difficult to determine whether they are delivering value for money.” The Liberal solution? Give the LHINs more power and control over health care.

This is the same sort of doubling down on incompetence that led to the Liberals’ e-Health electronic patient records scandal, their Ornge air ambulance scandal and their green energy scandal, which have wasted billions of dollars that didn’t go into health care.

All this from a government which, when it came to power in 2003 under McGuinty, imposed the largest single tax hike in Ontario history — up to $900 a person each year, raising $2.4 billion annually — that was all supposed to go to improving health care.

Remember? That was McGuinty’s excuse for breaking his election promise not to raise taxes. He called it a health-care “premium” instead.

If Hoskins is worried about the sustainability of health care, he should ask the auditor general to find out where all those billions of dollars have gone since 2003, and how much the Liberals spent on health care as opposed to bureaucracy, boondoggles and scandals.

To be fair, Ontario’s health-care system is grappling with the same long-standing problems of sustainability faced by provincial health-care systems across Canada, and publicly funded health-care systems globally.

The problem is the Liberals approach this crisis thinking they and their bureaucrats are the smartest people in the room — when they demonstrably are not — and that the bad guys are frontline workers, such as doctors, whom they vilify at every opportunity.

As long as they believe that, things will only get worse.