Twelve ways to fix Ontario’s healthcare crisis

Ontario’s healthcare is in crisis. The healthcare system has a self-inflicted wound, one that is infected and festering, threatening to rot the rest from the inside out. The sickness is rooted in greed, profit-seeking, and privatization — capitalism. In healthcare, to effectively treat an illness, one must treat the underlying cause or causes.

In the face of a worsening healthcare crisis and an ongoing global pandemic, the Ford government of Ontario has suggested that privatization may be the solution. However, we must ask ourselves who gains and profits from the privatization of our healthcare. This crisis was entirely avoidable, had numerous warnings ahead of time, and is a result of a declining healthcare sector. Hallway medicine (the treatment of patients in hospital hallways due to full rooms) has been a worsening and ongoing issue for decades, and the conditions for our elderly in long-term care facilities continually worsen.

Consider the growing crisis and strain of substance misuse and overdoses, the increasing mental health crisis, the staffing crisis across nursing, in which about one third of practical nurses and about 20 percent of registered nurses are considering leaving the profession, and the ongoing crisis with personal support workers and home care aids, over half of whom are choosing to leave the field after five years.

Across Ontario, numerous emergency rooms, ICUs, and other units have had to close down due to lack of staffing. Paramedics and other emergency medical workers are experiencing extreme burnout, short staffing, PTSD, and more, with numerous “code black” instances declared (all ambulances stuck off-loading patients, waiting for a bed, unavailable to answer a call).

This crisis is one that is self-inflicted, engineered purposefully in order to expose the so-called inadequacies of public ownership over private ownership. Experts warn and studies have routinely shown that merely increasing wages and monetary incentives won’t be enough to address the underlying problems and concerns of the staff.

Instead of further austerity and the privatization of our healthcare, the response should be more funding and the full socialization of healthcare, making it truly universal. Below are 12 simple points to consider that would improve our healthcare system and address every facet of this ongoing crisis, without turning to the profit motive.

• Make dental care free and public — tooth decay is a leading cause of hospitalizations for children.
• Expand urgent care access, providing better equipment, staffing, and expanded hours.
• Make mental health, pharmacy, and vision covered and part of universal healthcare.
• Expand addiction services, such as publicly owned withdrawal and rehabilitation services and safe consumption sites.
• Repeal Ontario Bill 124 — legislation that forcibly suppresses wages of public sector workers, including healthcare workers, capping wage increases at 0.9 percent.
• Increase full-time positions for all healthcare workers, instead of exploiting and overly relying on part-time staff.
• Socialize and unionize all long-term care facilities, make them publicly owned, remove profit from long-term care, and improve patient-to-worker ratios for worker and patient safety.
• Bring nurses and healthcare workers back into communities, bring back the school nurse and on-site workplace nurses — keep people safely and healthily in their homes, with their families, and in their communities.
• Eliminate tuition costs and forgive student debt for healthcare workers.
• Improve and incentivize the education and training of physicians to enter specialties, including paediatrics, orthosurgery, general practice, and family practice.
• Actually hold those who assault and harass healthcare workers to account.
• Bring back our nationalized, publicly owned laboratories.

The cost of privatization is far too high for the working class. We must come together now more than ever in the defence of our healthcare system. As capital becomes more desperate for profits and for new markets, the privatization and austerity we face now will only grow and fester, like an untreated wound. The youth say no to private medicine and to austerity!