Ontario’s healthcare system is in an undeniable crisis. Privatization isn’t the cure.
Emergency room wait times have reached a record high. Millions of Ontarians can’t find a family doctor. Patients in medical crises are forced to wait up to more than a year to see a specialist. In a country where healthcare is supposed to be universal, countless patients are left scrambling for medical care.
In response to this crisis, Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones have pushed to privatize aspects of Ontario’s healthcare network. For-profit clinics have been touted as the all-encoming solution to this crisis, “[taking] the burden off hospitals” in order to “serve the patient better,” as explained by Ford and Jones respectively.
While for-private clinics may offer short-term alleviation of the pressure on Ontario’s public healthcare network, private healthcare harms both the quality and accessibility of medical care in the long run.
A common belief is that private healthcare services are better quality than their public counterparts. This assumption isn’t unfounded—intuitively, it makes sense the more you pay for a service, the higher the quality of service you should be provided. However, a study by the University of Oxford from March 2024 revealed this assumption to be false.
The study reviewed various indicators for quality of care in high-income countries with increasingly privatized healthcare systems, comparing health outcomes pre- and post-privatization. Hospitals that converted from public to private ownership typically increased profits by cutting staff such as cleaners, which in turn, resulted in higher rates of patient infections. In some cases, privatization also corresponded with higher rates of avoidable deaths.
The idea that private healthcare promises quality of care is grossly misled. When medical services are privately owned, patient well-being is rendered secondary to profit. Cutting necessary costs comes at the direct expense of patients’ health outcomes. With such a dire need for these services, healthcare businesses aren’t incentivized to increase the quality of care to attract clients or compete with other businesses.
Ontarians will have no choice but to accept a lower quality of care if private healthcare services become the norm.
A key driver of Ontario’s current healthcare crisis is a lack of consistent access to medical care. Proponents of integrating for-profit medical services argue privatization will increase healthcare accessibility. But when individuals most impacted by Ontario’s healthcare crisis are living in poverty, it’s hard to comprehend how introducing a cost barrier to medical care will improve accessibility.
Ontario reported the lowest per capita spending on healthcare in Canada in the 2022-23 fiscal year. This trend hasn’t shifted. Greater investment in the health of our province is necessary to tackle the provincial healthcare crisis without compromising accessibility or quality of care.
Ontario’s public healthcare system is flawed in many ways. But the underlying principle of public healthcare can’t be sacrificed to fix these flaws, for privatizing healthcare is a rejection of healthcare as a fundamental human right.
Aaniqa is a second-year Political Studies and Health Studies student and one of The Journal’s Features Editors.
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