Mehra raised in her new report<\/a>, titled Bait and switch: How the Ford government\u2019s private clinics are taking away from local public hospitals, lengthening wait times & threatening public medicare, where she argues the provincial government\u2019s push for private clinics has failed to improve access to health care while also leaving many paying out of pocket for unnecessary procedures.<\/p>\n“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 \u2014 the surgeries and diagnostic imaging \u2014 and we can now see what the results are,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think the Ford government, really, now has to answer some very concrete questions about what’s happened here.”<\/p>\n
Although Premier Doug Ford has previously said that residents will pay \u201cwith their OHIP card, never their credit card\u201d at private clinics, the report found that patients have been deliberately upsold on unnecessary procedures during privately operated cataract surgeries \u2013 sometimes walking away with bills as high as $8,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything you need for cataract surgery is covered by OHIP,\u201d Mehra said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of us are waiting longer for wait times to be addressed because literally it’s taken years to just get these clinics online,\u201d Mehra said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s understaffed and underutilized \u2013 with operating rooms and MRI machines sitting idle in many cases.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New report from Ontario Health Coalition lays out why private health clinics are ‘not benefiting the public’ As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-898096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}