Reality bites when it comes to health care spending in Ontario - let's figure it out before it's too late

It's about time that organizations in the health care continuum stand up and tell the McGuinty government that enough is enough. After nearly a decade of criticizing the Conservative government for the way it handled its affairs, the leader who asked us to 'choose change' implemented a new health tax and came up with a new bureaucracy to manage its proceeds. We were told by Opposition Leader McGuinty that closing hospital beds and amalgamating organizations was not acceptable. Yet, that is precisely what the new Premier and his "Local Health Integration Networks" across the province essentially advocate years into the "change" for which Ontarians got suckered into voting into power.

I had to leave my career in the sector after twelve years because I could not take it anymore. Anyone who cared more about those needing the service of our health care system would be shunned and stonewalled by the "new" government and, here in Ottawa, by Dr. Robert Cushman as they were fed a steady diet of "needing to find efficiencies" to the point that the LHIN allocated $100,000 or more on computers and programs for area home support agencies while these same agencies were denied requests for a few thousand dollars for day programs for seniors or respite services for harried caregivers of ailing seniors or Alzheimer's patients. Untold millions were spent over the years on new staff dedicated to overseeing how hospitals, CCAC's, community health centres or home support agencies could discover 'efficiencies' after being victims of funding freezes through the early 1990's, increases below the rate of inflation in the 2000's, all while the population aged and grew by leaps and bounds year after after year. For the larger hospitals, I'm sure more than a million dollars have been spent in Ottawa alone to study studies while people waited and waited for desperately needed medical attention.

It's one thing to seek efficiencies, but it's another thing to be blind to the fact that a growing and aging population will simply cost hospitals, CCAC's and home support agencies more as the demand for their services continue to grow. It isn't 1978 or 2002 anymore, Mr. Premier.

Our governments need to plan today to head problems they seem to be creating for tomorrow. We no longer have a population of 300,000 in the City of Ottawa yet we are expected to figure out how to provide medical service to three times as many people with fewer and fewer "real dollars" as each year passes. If they don't rectify the problem today, the problem will increase in size exponentially in the next fifteen years. Most governments don't plan that far ahead, but we'll never get anywhere when it comes to having manageable hospital budgets if we do not factor in basic realities. It's time to wake up, Mr. Premier, before it is too late. Where are those health tax dollars going? New buildings are nice but give those who run those buildings the dollars to operate in them!!