Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives<\/a> (CCPA).<\/p>\nThe report, titled Not adding up: Surgical and diagnostic privatization in Ontario, authored by CCPA senior researcher Andrew Longhurst, reveals that the provincial government spent $4.1 billion between 2017 and 2025 on licensed private centres, known as integrated community health services centres (ICHSCs) and private hospitals.<\/p>\n
Despite claims that outsourcing reduces diagnostic and surgical backlogs, the data demonstrate that median wait times for eight of 12 publicly funded priority procedures, including MRI scans, cataract surgeries, and cancer treatments, actually increased over the same period.<\/p>\n
While public hospital surgical volumes grew by 10 per cent between 2017 and 2025, surgeries performed in private clinics surged by 117 per cent. Public funding to for-profit surgical facilities expanded at an average annual growth rate of 22.8 per cent between 2022 and 2025\u2014more than four times the 4.9 per cent funding increase allocated to public hospitals.<\/p>\n
The report also highlights significant gaps in financial reporting.<\/p>\n
While Ontario\u2019s Public Accounts reported $84.7 million transferred to ICHSCs, internal expenditure reporting obtained through Freedom of Information requests placed actual payments to these facilities at $659 million for 2024\u201325, indicating an under-reporting margin of 778 per cent. Additionally, the shift toward private delivery has coincided with a rise in unlawful extra-billing and user fees, with eye care procedures accounting for nearly one-third of recorded contraventions between 2023 and 2025.<\/p>\n
Local health advocates point out that this provincial shift occurs while existing resources at North Bay Regional Health Centre remain underused.<\/p>\n
Research from the Ontario Health Coalition indicates that North Bay\u2019s hospital has seven operating rooms, only one of which operates during evenings and weekends. Furthermore, the hospital\u2019s single MRI scanner sits idle overnight rather than operating on a 24\/7 schedule to reduce regional backlogs.<\/p>\n
“The CCPA\u2019s research shows that privatization is driven by ideology rather than by evidence,” said Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions. “We know that private delivery of hospital surgeries and diagnostics is more expensive, skews access to the wealthy and robs staff from the public system.”<\/p>\n
Hurley added that funding directed to private clinics should be redirected back into the public healthcare system to optimize existing hospital infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Longhurst recommends that the Ontario government halt the expansion of private surgical and diagnostic facilities, re-establish public accountability in healthcare expenditures, and allocate funding directly to public hospitals to staff and operate existing equipment to full capacity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health advocates in North Bay say the province\u2019s push toward private delivery comes while capacity at the North…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":925468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-925467","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\/925467","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=925467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}