Pandemic being used to push health-care privatization
Looking to the future can be difficult these days given that most of the country is still mired in Omicron and hospitals are bursting with infected patients.
But for those who promote privatized health care, it is an opportunity they are loathe to let pass.
So suddenly we are hearing more about Canada’s shameful lack of “hospital bed capacity” and how it needs to be drastically increased if we want to avoid chaos when the next deadly epidemic strikes.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney often remarks that the United States has so much more hospital bed capacity than Canada, as if we should look there if we want to solve the problem. Of course, he doesn’t mention that so many of those hospitals are for-profit and patients must pay either through private insurance, pay out-of-pocket or go without any treatment at all.
It is true, according to statistics compiled by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), that Canada is near the bottom of the list when it comes to acute care hospital beds per 1,000 population compared to 34 other countries. Japan has the most, with Korea a close second.
But this should come as no surprise. Provincial governments across the country have been cutting hospital beds for over 20 years. In Calgary, the government of Ralph Klein actually blew up a functioning hospital in 1998 and closed another one, which to this day still sits mostly empty.
Hospitals were seen as too costly, too complex and too inefficient. Care needed to be moved into the “community.” So we ended up paying out-of-pocket for services such as physiotherapy or certain cancer treatments that had been punted from the hospital.
Services like home care and longterm care were contracted to private companies, which often meant less government oversight and lower standards of care.
The bed cutting means that most of the time hospitals are running at almost 100 per cent capacity — never mind the pandemic. This is certainly the case in Alberta and B.C., which have the lowest number of ICU beds per 100,000 population of all the provinces.
Dr. Noel Gibney of the University of Alberta, an intensive care specialist who has worked in both academia and on the front lines, says underneath the latest discussions about bed capacity is a presumption that more private hospitals or clinics would solve the problem.
For sure, the problem has been exacerbated by the thousands of surgeries and procedures that had to be cancelled because of the surge of COVID-19 cases.
In Alberta, the Kenney government is already seeking proposals from entrepreneurs who want to establish surgical clinics outside of hospitals. Kenney says public health insurance would still cover the cost of the surgery. But if profit is built into the business model, how much public money will be used to enrich those entrepreneurs? And how can we be assured that patients won’t be subjected to added costs that must be paid outof-pocket. And as Gibney points out, it’s not just a matter of beds.
“Staffing is the major limitation to increasing hospital capacity at a time when health care professionals are leaving our hospitals at an unprecedented rate … opening private hospitals would strip public hospitals of staff and would not increase capacity,” he said during a recent livestreamed presentation organized by Protect our Province (Alberta), a group of physicians and epidemiologists who provide regular updates and advice on the COVID-19 crisis.
In many ways, the pandemic has provided opportunity, and cover, for politicians such as Kenney and medi-entrepreneurs who have long wanted to cash in on health care through the public purse.
Public health care is too important to be left in their hands. Only when people from all walks of life step up to protect and improve it will it still be there for all of us.