Federal healthcare funding should have strings attached
Posted on December 17, 2022 in Health Policy Context
Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Star Editorial Board
TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials
Dec. 17, 2022. By Star Editorial Board
Ottawa is offering strategic funding to address the healthcare crisis. The premiers want a firehose of cash. Ottawa is right.
When Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones stepped to the podium at Collingwood General and Marine Hospital this week she had good news.
Ontario was investing more than $20 million to run magnetic resonance imaging labs in 27 small and rural hospitals, saving patients the stress of traveling for much-needed MRIs in a province where barely one-third of patients receive the scan in a timely fashion.
Except there is no MRI machine in the Collingwood hospital. It will have to raise up to the $5 million-plus needed to purchase an MRI itself. Ontario will only pay to run the machine.
Want a machine? Buy it yourself. Such is the state of health care in this country that even the hint of good news turns out to be a chimera.
Such sleight-of-hand is an apt metaphor for a system in crisis which has been further debased by political power plays and paint-by-number mathematical calculations. There was a time when Canadians bragged about their health care system. Those days have been consigned to the distant past. Today the system is more and more a source of shame and increasing worries about getting timely treatment.
To relieve a system under intense pressure, the premiers are demanding an immediate infusion of $28 billion from Ottawa, then annual increases of $6 billion — and a summit with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. While they hold fast to that demand, federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos claims he has essentially reached agreement with provincial health ministers on targeted funding, but they are being undermined by the premiers. Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has threatened to withdraw from an agreement with Trudeau which keeps the minority Liberals in power if the federal government doesn’t ante up.
Let’s look at these baleful realities in turn.
First, Canada’s premiers are being disingenuous when they claim Ottawa’s funding of health care has sunk to 22 per cent. They say their requested money would take Ottawa’s share back to 33 per cent, but their dubious math does not include a long-standing policy in which Ottawa ceded tax revenue to allow the provinces to reap more revenue of their own which could go to health care. The premiers make no mention of federal equalization payments which could also go to health care. Ottawa says put all that together, plus individual bilateral deals with provinces, and its share of health funding tops 38 per cent.
The premiers want this money without strings, looking covetously at the ATM on the Rideau.
Duclos says provincial health ministers have privately agreed that any funding should be accompanied by strategies and measurement targets to deliver health care differently in 2022 and beyond. Ottawa wants funding to be tied priority items such as access to family doctors, recruiting and retaining health care workers, reducing surgical backlogs and designing systems in which data can reliably be shared.
Meanwhile, Singh has sided with the premiers, but walking away from the agreement with the Liberals would only move his party much closer to an election it would not relish.
Simply dumping health care dollars in provincial capitals is not a solution. Tossing money at Doug Ford, who has chosen license rebates and gas tax cuts (extended for another year) over more health spending is a particularly bad idea. It would offer a bandage when triage is required. Without a strategy and targets, there would be no assurance the extra federal funds would be going to healthcare, let alone the priority areas that medical professionals have identified as particularly urgent.
There’s no point in Trudeau meeting with the premiers until they are ready to accept some form of accountability for federal funding, not a blank cheque.
While politicians parry, children’s hospitals have cancelled surgeries to free up beds for an influx of young patients dealing with severe flu and respiratory ailments. Ottawa’s Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario has reached out to the Red Cross for emergency assistance. Teenage patients have been transferred to adult ICUs to free up space for younger patients.
The personal stories revealed in these pages are heartbreaking — the four-year-old girl with Down’s Syndrome and suffering from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) who waited 40 hours for emergency treatment and critically ill four-year-old Remy Rutherford, suffering from a potentially fatal condition, who had to be airlifted 350 kilometres for treatment are but two of many.
We are failing our children. Ourselves. Our future.
Ottawa is offering strategic funding. The premiers want a firehose of cash. Ottawa is right and if the premiers won’t collectively come to their senses, the federal government would be right to deal individually with any provincial premier willing to show leadership in a time of crisis.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2022/12/17/federal-healthcare-funding-should-have-strings-attached.html
Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, jurisdiction
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