Ford’s vague promises for health care don’t add up
Doug Ford loves to tell voters he’s got a plan to save Ontario’s health-care system, promising to cut wait times for patients, put an end to “hallway medicine” and save both jobs and money.
“My message to the people who are waiting and the people who are frustrated is that change is coming and help is on the way,” Ford said at a recent rally in Sarnia.
It’s a classic, cynical Ford campaign tactic: Make big promises, provide no details of how he’d implement or pay for them, and tell voters simply to “trust” him to get the job done.
But before the rookie Conservative leader makes any more wild promises, he should listen closely to what U.S. President Donald Trump, one of his political idols, has said about health care.
After telling American voters he would kill Obamacare and reform the U.S. health-care system, Trump ran into the grim reality of how difficult such a promise was to implement.
“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” Trump admitted grudgingly to the National Governors Association soon after taking office last year. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” In fact, everybody except Trump knew exactly how complicated it could be.
Like Trump, Ford is totally naive when it comes to health care. What else would explain his pledge to improve the system while simultaneously vowing to slash 4 per cent out of every departmental budget? For the health ministry, which is the largest item in the provincial budget at $61 billion annually, that’s about $2.4 billion a year. Such a massive cut would totally destabilize the entire health-care system.
Worse, Ford has selected a team of advisers dominated by hard-line doctors and health professionals with personal agendas of seeking more private, two-tier medicine in Ontario.
Taken together, these are clears signals that hard times are ahead for health care under a Ford government.
Oddly, with just two weeks to go before the June 7 election, Ford has yet to release his health-care platform. We should be calling Ford “the man with no plan,” not former leader Patrick Brown.
For weeks, Ford has talked vaguely of ending “hallway medicine,” but doesn’t say how. He’s promised to add 15,000 new long-term care beds over the next five years, although home-care advocates say that’s impossible to do in such a short time frame.
He’s hinted he’d offer doctors a plan where they would pay no provincial tax if they work in northern Ontario. He’s also pledged to spend $1.9 billion over the next 10 years to build a comprehensive mental-health system, which he copied directly from Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” document and which I described last December as a “hidden gem” in his platform.
For the past 20 years, health care has been the Tories’ biggest image issue, with memories still sharp of the 1990s when the Mike Harris government ordered 28 hospitals closed and fired 6,000 nurses.
Harris ignited a firestorm of protests when he suggested nurses were as obsolete as hula-hoop makers. “Just as hula hoops went out and those workers had to have a factory and a company that would manufacture something else that’s in, it’s the same for government,” Harris said.
Today, the Liberals and NDP are suggesting Ford’s cuts could result in dozens of hospital closings and the firing of thousands of health-care professionals. For his part, Ford insists not a single worker would be laid off because of his proposed cuts.
But where would Ford find the “efficiencies” that he claims can be found in the health-care system.
Is it in hospitals, which get $17 billion a year? Is it in doctor fees, which total $12.5 billion and could rise another $1 billion if doctors win their fight for a fee increase? Is it in home care, which serves 600,000 patients and is already woefully short of adequate funding? Would he kill off eHealth or reduce Cancer Care Ontario?
The bottom line is that Ford’s healthcare positions don’t add up. At best, they are simplistic. At worst, they are dangerous to the future health of our entire medical system.