Category Archives: Health System

Quebec patients told to pay up if they want to jump the queue with the same physician

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

In Quebec patients are being told to wait two years for public care or pay $10,000 to have their surgery within two weeks with the same specialist.

Many specialists in Quebec work both sides of the street, with one foot in the public system, another in the private.

Are specialists deliberately dragging their heels on public appointments to pad their private practice?

Quebec’s Health Minister says the practice of inflating waits in the public system to push patients into the private system is untenable and has asked the College of Physicians to investigate.

The Montreal Gazette reported a year ago that such practices were taking place. They documented the case of a patient at Charles LeMoyne Hospital who couldn’t get an appointment with a specialist for two years, but could walk across the street and get an appointment with the same physician within two weeks.

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Posted in Health System

Tagged Private health care, Quebec health care, two-tier health care

Drummond Report: Commission relies on unfounded assumptions about hospitals

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of the assumptions of the Drummond Commission report is that if health care services take place in a hospital, it is going to be more expensive.

As Tony Randall once expounded in an episode of television series The Odd Couple, when you “assume,” underlining parts of the word on a blackboard, you end up making an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

Under such cost assumptions, Drummond recommends anything that isn’t acute care be delivered somewhere else.

The Commissioner does not say what those services would be, but it would be safe to bet it would include rehab, complex continuing care, mental health, palliative care, outpatient clinics and diagnostics, to name but a few. That’s a lot of service to come out of our public hospitals leaving us to wonder what would be left behind?

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Posted in Health System, Local Health Integration Networks, Mental Health

Tagged Drummond Report

Drummond Report: How to manufacture a crisis

Posted on February 17, 2012 | 2 comments

Don Drummond certainly knows how to manufacture a crisis.

For several years now he has been telling us that public health care spending is out of control, and that if left unchecked, it would soon consume 70 per cent of the provincial budget. Since those projections, spending on health care has actually gone down as a share of provincial program spending, from 46 per cent to 42 per cent.

Oddly, despite a trend line going in the opposite direction, Drummond continues to maintain this forecast.

Now, as Commissioner for Public Service Reform, he is telling us that if we don’t enter into a period of extreme austerity, we will soon be the Greece of Canada.

Don’t break out the tzatziki sauce yet.

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Posted in Health System

Tagged Don Drummond, Drummond Commission, Dwight Duncan, Ontario and Greece, Ontario Budget

Drummond Report: Will Dalton McGuinty really implement this mess?

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Two days after the Drummond Report was publicly released it is fair to wonder what will actually be implemented for health care. After all, it is not Don Drummond running the province, but Dalton McGuinty.

McGuinty is the master of building firewalls between his policies and the decision-makers at Queen’s Park. For example, how many times did we hear McGuinty and his MPPs suggest unpopular health care decisions were not theirs, but those of the Local Health Integration Networks? Now Don Drummond is the latest lightening rod that separates a long list of nasty trial balloons from the politicians who would like to see how much austerity the public will accept.

The government treated the release of Drummond’s report much like it does the budget, locking up journalists and opposition politicians until the official release at 2:15 pm Wednesday. This is hardly standard protocol and suggests the government was taking the recommendations very seriously. Or was this just optics?

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Posted in Health System, Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged Don Drummond, Drummond Commission, Health Care Planning

Drummond Report: A surprise warning

Posted on February 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

Hidden among the many recommendations of the Drummond Commission is a surprise warning about the pitfalls of a Canada-European Union Free Trade Agreement.

Drummond points out that the $500 million in savings from the government’s generic drug pricing reforms could be wiped out if the province’s interests are not protected by the Harper government.

Harmonizing patent protection for brand-name drugs to European standards would keep generic drugs off the market for a longer time.

Drummond highlights the findings of a study done by Aidan Hollis (University of Calgary) and Paul Grootendorst (University of Toronto) who noted that if all three of the EU pharmaceutical intellectual property proposals are adopted, it will cost Ontarians up to $1.2 billion annually. Slightly less than half — $551 million, would be added cost to the government, whereas the rest would come out-of-pocket and from private employer health plans.

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Posted in Health System

Tagged Canada-EU Free Trade, Don Drummond, Drug Patent Legislation, Drummond Report, Pharmaceuticals

Drummond Report: Health care sectors get funding restraint… and a pony

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 2 comments

Don Drummond wants to provide every health care provider with their own pony while the system gets squeezed another notch tighter.

In his report released this week, the Commissioner on Public Sector reform wants to implement everything from increased salaries for the CEOs of the Local Health Integration Networks to triple the per capita spending on public health.

All this is to take place while restraining health care spending increases to 2.5 per cent per year – about half the funding increase from 2011.

Where the savings come from with all this new investment is not clear, nor is there an explanation on how so much can be done with so little. In fact, there is very little costing associated with any of these recommendations.

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Posted in CCAC, Health System, Home Care, Hospitals, Local Health Integration Networks

Tagged Don Drummond, Drummond Report

IMF cautions against severe austerity

Posted on February 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Those working to preserve public services – including health care – may have found an unlikely ally in the IMF (International Monetary Fund).

After having pressed for severe cuts to public services in nations facing high public debt, the IMF is now cautioning that cutting too quickly may worsen the economic crisis.

This comes after weeks of dire predictions by Reform Commissioner Don Drummond, whose recommendations are due out today.

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Posted in Health System

Tagged Austerity, Carlo Cottarelli, Don Drummond, IMF

Home care agencies, for-profits absent from disclosure

Posted on February 13, 2012 | 1 comment

The recent scandals at ORNGE showed how executives tried to use a series of for-profit companies within their non-profit structure to evade compensation disclosure.

For-profit companies do not have to disclose salaries under the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act. They can pay their CEOs whatever they like, and we have no right to access that information no matter how much public money is poured into that company.

As the government expands the use of private companies (both for-profit and not-for-profit) to deliver more public health care, the less we will know about how it is spent.

Speedboats and European MBAs anyone?

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Posted in Health System

Tagged Financial disclosure rules, Michael Decter, St. Elizabeth Health Care, Sunshine List

Dr. Fonberg, Karma and Accountability

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 6 comments

It was with interest we saw Dr. Eric Fonberg’s name appear in the Toronto Star over the weekend. Fonberg, along with 10 other colleagues from York Central Hospital, had decided the best place to have a meeting about hospital “accountability” would be Boca Raton, Florida. We can hear the snickers from here.

Fonberg is better known to us as the former Chair of Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health. Fonberg served in that role while the hospital was undergoing a number of cost-saving service changes last year, including layoff of 28 child and youth workers employed in a unique and intensive program for hard-to-serve youth.

While the layoffs were originally described as “evidence-based,” the evidence didn’t hold up to scrutiny when a former employee of the Centre decided to dig a little deeper. In the end it wasn’t so much an evidence-based decision as a “me-too” decision, following the lead of other hospitals which equally lacked solid evidence in which to make their decision.

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