Outcomes in for-profit LTC homes clearly worse

Re Ownership model didn’t drive heartbreaking LTC outcomes, Letter, Oct. 17

Thomas Wellner’s letter is completely disingenuous.

He says “contrary to (John Anderson’s) piece Revera is not publicly owned,” meaning it has no publicly held shares. However, it is 100 per cent owned by the federal government through the Public Service Pension Investment Board, a crown agency.

He berates Anderson’s failure “to recognize that the ownership model did not drive heartbreaking outcomes in long-term care” when the CBC’s Marketplace analysis of deaths last December demonstrated that for-profit homes were worst.

At the end of February, the Star’s own detailed statistical analysis “of COVID-19 outbreaks across several different factors, from the age of a home, to local infection rates, to the size of the facility, among others” demonstrated that “whether looking at those factors in isolation, or in dozens of combinations, for-profit homes reported the highest rate of deaths per registered bed in virtually every case.”

Bernard Katz, Toronto