Hospital MRIs sit idle overnight as province funds private clinics: report

New report from Ontario Health Coalition lays out why private health clinics are ‘not benefiting the public’

As the provincial government invests in private MRI and surgical clinics, publicly funded facilities at Sault Area Hospital and around the province sit idle for hours every day.

Despite $155 million in funding announced for private MRI, CT and endoscopy facilities in 2025, the local hospital’s lone MRI machine sits unused for upwards of eight hours overnight on any given day – with similar trends at hospitals across Ontario.

“First they had to put out bidding that would not be necessary, but for the privatization,” said Natalie Mehra, executive director with the Ontario Health Coalition, in an interview with SooToday.

“Then they had to build these redundant MRIs and operating rooms, when we have them existing in every part of Ontario – underused.”

It’s one of many issues Mehra raised in her new report, titled Bait and switch: How the Ford government’s private clinics are taking away from local public hospitals, lengthening wait times & threatening public medicare, where she argues the provincial government’s push for private clinics has failed to improve access to health care while also leaving many paying out of pocket for unnecessary procedures.

“We’re now five years in since the Ford government announced its plans to privatize what are really the core services of our public hospitals — the surgeries and diagnostic imaging — and we can now see what the results are,” she said.

“I think the Ford government, really, now has to answer some very concrete questions about what’s happened here.”

Although Premier Doug Ford has previously said that residents will pay “with their OHIP card, never their credit card” at private clinics, the report found that patients have been deliberately upsold on unnecessary procedures during privately operated cataract surgeries – sometimes walking away with bills as high as $8,000.

“Everything you need for cataract surgery is covered by OHIP,” Mehra said.

“People shouldn’t be put in a position where they’re being manipulated into paying thousands of dollars because they think that their surgery will have poorer outcomes if they don’t, or because they’re just plain lied to.”

For those who cannot afford the bill, or those who live in northern or rural areas where there are exceedingly few private clinics, the lengthy wait times the Ford government aimed to tackle with private clinics have only improved access for certain people.

According to the report, a study by the Canadian Medical Association found that, between 2017 and 2022, the rate of cataract surgeries rose 22 per cent for people in the highest economic bracket while simultaneously falling 8.5 per cent for those in the lowest.

Beyond concerns about inequity, Mehra also argues that the funding used to open private clinics could have been put to better use in the public system.

“All of us are waiting longer for wait times to be addressed because literally it’s taken years to just get these clinics online,” Mehra said.

“I think it’s irrefutable that the wait times for everyone are longer because of all the wasted time and attempts to spend money on privatizing.”

She also points out that public hospital funding has failed to keep pace with inflation in costs in recent years, arguing that investments in private health facilities have created competition with a public system that’s understaffed and underutilized – with operating rooms and MRI machines sitting idle in many cases.

While the provincial budget for public hospitals hit $27.5 billion in 2025/26, and investments in private clinics have only hit hundreds of millions, Mehra said that funding could nonetheless support the public in a better way than a private system can.

“The number of services that money could buy in public hospitals is a lot. I realize that the overall spending figures in public hospitals is on a totally different scale, but it’s also a lot of money to just transfer over to private clinics,” she said.

“I think the more important point is that it costs more to the public and is not accessible to most of Ontario . . . geographically and income-wise, so it’s not benefiting the public.”