Getting the best value for health care

Re We must change the way we pay for our health care, June 4 Alexis Wise has a point. But her suggestion of health funding by outcomes, although it has some validity, is not the whole story.

Our health costs can only be minimized if people are able to live healthy lives. No amount of expert care can compensate for the ill-health caused by poverty and its accompanying stress and unhealthy lifestyles. Mental-health problems, help for which is grossly underfunded, are escalating among young people caught between the costs of higher education and the scarcity of good jobs, plus a rapidly changing world and the depressing outlook for our climate’s future.

Premier Kathleen Wynne is tinkering with these problems, but the federal government needs to step up and provide adequate funding, including pharmacare and dental care. A guaranteed minimum income could do wonders for our health.

Our health service is not only being inadequately funded, it is being slowly dismembered by stealth privatization.

Privatization is always suspect because it necessitates a profit surplus to costs, and motivates wage and cost cutting.

Most health workers are already working hard and doing a good job.

Let’s help them to do even better. Jenny Carter, Peterborough The author of this op-ed would have us believe that “performance-based contracts” with private for profit corporations is part of the solution to our perceived problem of low efficiency in our health care system.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are problems in the system but privatization i.e. for profit health care will only lead to lower quality and cheaper labour costs.

Only the wealthy will be able to obtain quality health care under such a scenario. Ted Turner, Toronto