Public healthcare “starved of much-needed funds”

OUR READERS WRITE

Our MPP Sylvia Jones as Ontario Minister of Health recently announced that her Progressive Conservative government is “boldly breaking the status quo (regarding health in Ontario) that has stifled innovation and struggled to respond to growing challenges and changing needs.”

This, from an MPP whose government has been in power for the last four-plus years.

Unfortunately, on their watch we have seen PSWs overworked, a tragic number of seniors in private for-profit nursing homes dying in abject conditions, waiting times in emergency wards and surgeries ballooning up, emergency room closures, nurses being driven out of work in droves and doctors struggling to meet the needs of their patients and sometimes close to burn out.

Peter Weltman at the Financial Accountability Office recently projected Ontario would be short 33.000 nurses and PSWs by 2028 and that current shortages will continue for the next six years. The government, the financial accountability report added, will be $21 billion short to cover its commitment over the next six years to expand hospitals, long term care and home care.

Our public health has been starved of much needed funds. Restore the funds to it rather than siphon them off in a new private health system. Unlike private for-profit health services, public health care responds to the needs of the community rather than fill the coffers of private companies or shareholders.

I share the dread many people have expressed at the possibility of losing the soul of our health system: it can be rendered second class by a for-profit system that would pluck the best health practitioners out of it and in undue time add unforeseen costs to its services and products.

Carmel Hili

Caledon