Thursday, April 10, 2008

Ontario Liberals claim medicare is a "free-for-all": so they cut hospital beds and nurses!

Joanna Smith wrote in “Hospital cuts spark storm”, (Toronto Star, April 9, 2008):

“Health Minister George Smitherman said there will be no "blank cheque" to help hospitals facing staff and service cuts despite a storm that erupted yesterday over the loss of up to 72 nursing positions at two GTA hospitals.
"How can you justify the firing of nurses?" Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer thundered at Smitherman repeatedly in the Legislature's daily question period.
Smitherman said Rouge Valley Health System hospitals in Ajax and Scarborough planning to cut up to 220 jobs and close 36 beds cannot expect a bailout because they have been poorly run and exceeded their budget.
"I don't prefer that in any circumstance," he said of the cuts. "But the alternative is to have a free-for-all where hospitals spend whatever they want and send the bill at the end of the year. The people's health system can't be sustained on that basis."
Smitherman said any nurses that lose their jobs at the Ajax and Pickering hospital or Scarborough Centenary can expect to find work nearby as the government hires 9,000 more nurses by 2011.
A report released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information last November showed Rouge Valley had the fifth-highest mortality rate among hospitals in the GTA.
"You don't solve an issue as serious as this by cutting the number of RNs on staff," said Doris Grinspun, executive director of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario. "You do the opposite."
NDP Leader Howard Hampton said the financial trouble hospitals are facing is in part due to millions of extra dollars going to build and expand hospitals with public-private partnerships that pay a premium to the builders.
"Less and less is going to patient care and more and more of the money is being siphoned off by profit-driven companies."
Ontario Health Coalition director Natalie Mehra criticized the level of secrecy surrounding the allocation of public money, especially since a large number of hospitals are threatened with deficits.
"This is really a regime of secrecy and top-down restructuring that is almost guaranteed to create significant problems in the health system for access and with no proper feedback group or evaluation," Mehra said. "It's really just bad governance."
Rouge Valley Health System is not alone in struggling to balance its books this spring to comply with zero-deficit legislation, but the answer to how many hospitals are in that situation is still unknown.
An Ontario Hospital Association survey conducted about a month ago as a pre-budget exercise revealed 75 Ontario hospitals forecast deficits for fiscal 2008/09. For fiscal 2009/10, that number increased to 103 of the 151 hospitals that responded to the survey.
Up to 19 hospitals in the GTA forecast deficits in 2008/09 and 26 in 2009/10.
The survey, which was not intended for public release, did not name individual hospitals or include the size of the forecasted deficits.
But the OHA said these projections were based on hospital funding that had been announced up to that point: increases of 2.4 per cent for 2008/09 and 2.1 per cent for 2009/10.
The provincial budget has since allocated a 6.1 per cent funding increase.
Since the Ministry of Health has not revealed how that money will be divvied up, hospitals continue negotiating while still somewhat in the dark.
"Our opinion is that there is not much point in projecting a deficit when you don't have all the information on what your revenues are going to be," said Tom Closson, CEO for the OHA.
This is the first time hospitals are negotiating two-year funding agreements with the newly created Local Health Integration Networks – agencies set up by the government to run health care on a regional basis and decide which services to fund and where. The "accountability agreements" were supposed to have been signed by the end of last month but Closson said all the LHINs have been granting hospitals deadline extensions as they wait for additional funding announcements.
He also said some negotiations involve allowing hospitals to operate with a deficit in 2008/09 so long as they balance the books by 2009/10.
Closson said the ministry must estimate by April 15 how much of the funding increases will go to growth, priority programs, inflation and other needs.
"I would hope by the end of April, at the latest, that the hospitals will have a clearer picture of whether there are additional funds that each one of them is going to receive," Closson said, adding that it could be June before all the accountability agreements are put into place.
Smitherman yesterday pointed to a recent peer review conducted by the Central East LHIN that concluded years of mismanagement and overspending had pushed Rouge Valley into its critical financial situation.
"There's room for improvement," said Smitherman, who has in previous years come through with year-end funds to help hospitals after weeks of rhetoric and wrangling.
"It wouldn't be fair to bail out Rouge Valley for activity that other hospitals are not involved in," he added. "I think the taxpayers are going to thank goodness, for once, there's a minister of health and a government that doesn't allow hospitals to operate on a blank cheque basis."
Ontario's health budget is now $40 billion and accounts for almost half of the government's spending on programs, with Premier Dalton McGuinty noting health spending is up 37 per cent since he took power in 2003.
Critics said Smitherman is ignoring the needs of hospitals in fast-growing areas.”

I say the Liberals are ignoring the health-care needs of hospitals in all areas.

Is that Jim Bradley’s Liberal government-run health monopoly cutting jobs and closing beds in hospitals? (yes, it is!)

Is that Jim Bradley’s Liberal government firing nurses – some of the supposed “5,000 nurses” whomt they supposedly hired?! (yes!)

Is that Jim Bradley's Liberal government saying that hospitals shouldn't be doing whatever it takes to provide health-care to Ontarians who need it?! (yes!)


If it is the "people's system" - as an ever-more-Soviet-sounding-Smitherman now calls his medicare monopoly - then why isn't Smitherman's "system" working FOR THE PEOPLE, George??



Smitherman was quoted using the phrase "free-for-all" in the above Apr.9, 2008 Star story - yet he said the same thing about the Niagara Health System in the St. Catharines Standard, Dec. 7, 2007, (See: Liberals ignore call for health-monopoly investigation), where he lectured:
"I do think the Niagara Health System likes to rely a little bit too much on the idea that it's all about money, and I think that's a fallacy. I think (that argument) can become a little too relied upon. What it kind of suggests is the only thing that's the answer to health-care woes is a fiscal free-for-all, spend whatever you want."

"Spend whatever you want"??

Smitherman's health monopoly is not providing us with what we NEED, let alone with what we want!

Smitherman thinks that the health-care monopoly -which he has controlled for five years - is on a spending "free-for-all" ?? Patients are dying in his Liberal health-monopoly's overcrowded emergency-room hallways! Where is all this flagrant spending occurring? The Ontario Auditor recently reported that the Liberals don't even have a clue of how many operating rooms they have - and many of them are closed or understaffed, anyway! We just had 190 surgery cancellations here in the NHS during March break!

Rouge Valley had the fifth-highest mortality rate in CIHI’s Nov. 2007 study.
But here in St. Catharines, our hospital, in Liberal MP Jim Bradley’s own riding, had the third-highest mortality-rate in Canada … and Jim Bradley has said nothing to explain that shocking and disgraceful revelation.
When the the Niagara Health System said in Dec. 2007 they needed more money – what answer did Bradley provide? Some Grit bafflegab about reviewing governance models? Talk about the futility of carefully re-arranging the deck chairs while holes in the big ship grow ever-larger! Whether it’s in Toronto or Niagara or Sarnia, the problems within Ontario’s Liberal health-monopoly are recurring, and systemic.

Bradley hides from answering questions about where our health-taxes are being spent, and whether they are being allocated efficiently and appropriately.

Smitherman said there will be no "blank cheque" to help hospitals facing staff and service cuts: in other words, Jim Bradley’s Liberals are forcing hospitals (in the "people's system", remember!) to cut service and ration treatment; to ‘live within their means’ – WHILE CONCURRENTLY DENYING CITIZENS THE LEGAL RIGHT TO PURCHASE THEIR OWN HEALTH-CARE IN ONTARIO.

On what basis is Smitherman sustaining his monopoly - on cuts to our coverage!?

And he thinks we're supposed to say "thank goodness"??!
Some of us will say "Go to Hell, Smitherman".
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