Health Minister Deborah Matthews has been deflating expectations this week, suggesting Ontario hospitals could still find themselves short despite the promise of an increase in funding.
“Definitely layoff notices will be happening this year,” Matthews told the Hamilton-area media last week.
The health minister now says the McGuinty government had to invest significant money over the past six years to make up for the underfunded system the Harris/Eves government left behind.
“Healthcare was underfunded for so long,” she said. “We had to repair the damaged by the previous government. Now we have to knit the different pieces together.”
Matthews still maintains that the current level of funding is unsustainable despite recognizing present costs stem from previous underfunding. The question remains – in a new era of underfunding, is the McGuinty government recreating the same cycle of boom and bust in health care funding?
Matthews has also been silent about the six per cent a year increase in Federal transfers to the province for health care.
The Minister told the Brockville Recorder and Times that the way health care is changing, there is less demand for beds.
“The demand for those beds is not what it used to be,” she told the newspaper.
The Minister neglects the fact that most hospital beds are at capacity. Earlier this year the OHA’s Tom Closson told a legislative committee that more than 700 patients were waiting for these same beds on that particular day.
Matthews said about 20 per cent of beds being used by hospitals are being occupied by patients who shouldn’t be there. Unfortunately, most of these patients have no realistic alternative, especially when CCACs in the Champlain and Central East LHINs are struggling to meet demand by even the most acute patients.
Tom Closson had also stated that it was his expectation that hospitals would receive a two per cent increase. Despite the fact that The Ottawa Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario are presently moving forward based on that assumption, there is less confidence in recent weeks that this increase will materialize in the provincial budget.
OPSEU Diablogue 
I hope the Liberal MPP’s will freeze their wages this year and Hospital CEO’s and executives will freeze their high wages as that may mean a few front line staff can stay.
The Liberal government helped bail out GM and Chrysler and yet are hurting the hospitals.