Emergency Meeting to Fight Back Against the Ford Government’s Privatization of our Public Hospitals
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM This is a virtual event
The following is from the Ontario Health Coalition:
All members, supporters and allies please join this emergency online meeting as we plan to mount a major and urgent fightback against Doug Ford’s initiative to privatize our public hospitals.
Last week, the Ford government announced their plans to build new for-profit surgical/diagnostic hospitals and expand for-profit clinics. At the same time, the Ford government has left our public hospitals with operating rooms that are closed in the evenings, on weekends, for days and months at a time, or even permanently, due to inadequate funding and staffing to run them. Similarly, MRIs and other diagnostics in public hospitals have been limited due to inadequate funding and staffing. Now, after having worsened the staffing crisis in public hospitals and having done nothing to ramp up public hospitals to operate to their capacity, Ford is launching privatization of their core services as if it is a “solution”. It is the old formula: create a crisis and privatize.
The private for-profit clinics that already exist in Ontario and across Canada are ground zero for extra-billing patients thousands of dollars for medically-needed diagnostic tests and surgeries. In addition, they routinely “upsell”, manipulating patients into paying for medically unnecessary add-ons. It is already a very serious problem, and those for-profit clinics only do a small portion of what Ford is planning.
We are deeply concerned. The plan that Ford is now putting into action poses a fatal threat to public medicare in our province and our country. We are going to do everything in our power to stop this privatization.
We have some ideas to mount a fightback that could stop them if we can build it big enough. Please join us.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023 via Zoom, 7 – 8:30 pm
Please register and fill in the information here (you will receive the Zoom link by email after you register): https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApd-upqDksG9PtSt5qAbsgMDZ3VnVAY6Zd