The too-high cost of private health care

I want to thank my grandfather for a wake-up call about Doug Ford.

He’s been dead nearly 66 years. But this week, he reminded me what a Ford re-election will mean in its legacy of for-profit health care for generations to come.

Many may not have needed that wake-up call; it’s hard to miss Ford’s ongoing enthusiastic privatization of our health care. A few examples: he failed to protect thousands of vulnerable citizens from suffering and death in for-profit long-termcare homes.

He rewarded the owners of those homes, promising new, lucrative 30-year contracts. He privatized home care. In a pandemic, he privatized administration of vaccines and COVID testing, supplying the bulk of free testing to private schools.

Yet, many of us don’t seem too worried, possibly because of the stealth under which Ford operates, including his quiet rush to pass Bill 37 (enabling the awarding of thousands of new long-term-care beds to for-profit chains) and Bill 218 (extending legal protection to those same chains). And Ford’s doublespeak hasn’t helped: announcing the intention to privatize hospitals, his health minister creatively spoke of “independent health facilities.”

But families whose loved ones died in long-term care see through Ford’s bafflegab. Others of us may have to go further back to remember.

Those with long memories may recall the summer of 1962. Saskatchewan doctors were striking against the introduction of Medicare. I was a kid; my father, a pediatrician in Hamilton’s east end, talked of Tommy Douglas, hoping for Medicare for families under his care, but also remembering the precarity of the pre-Medicare era for his own family. This is where my grandfather comes in.

My grandfather immigrated to Hamilton in 1909. (When asked why he left Italy, aged 15, his answer never varied: “We were starving.”) In the mid-1950s, he and my grandmother died in quick succession. I have a window into their world only because our family saved everything, and I mean everything.

Every photograph; every birth announcement; every wedding invitation. Every card of congratulations or sympathy. Over three generations — my grandfather, later my father, later my sister and I — discarded almost nothing.

Included in our family “archive” is every payment to a doctor, medical service and admission to hospital. First, those for my grandmother’s care — one visit: $7; the next: $20; the next: $200 — accumulating steadily to her death. In March 1955, my grandfather himself was admitted to hospital, an admission which cost over $1,400. In today’s dollars: nearly $15,000.

My grandfather, still working at his store at Imperial Street and Sherman Avenue, was able to pay that bill, and others, totalling tens of thousands. Many of his neighbours could not. What happened to them is not so carefully recorded.

Today in Ontario, no one has to worry about paying for admission to hospital — because a few years after my grandparents died, Tommy Douglas pledged health care “for every man, woman, and child, irrespective of colour, race or financial status.” But years later, Douglas warned Medicare was being marked for destruction. We may reasonably fear that, if he is re-elected on June 2, Ford will be empowered to complete that destruction.

My grandfather gave me a precious gift. The records he so painstakingly saved illustrate the toll imposed on ordinary Canadians by a for-profit health-care system. If we wish to avoid returning to those grim times, we must express our concern at the ballot box.