British MP warns Ontario privatized health care is not the way to go

Story by Ryan Edmunds / Special to Baytoday.ca

British Labour MP and former health minister, Frank Dobson, was invited to North Bay by the Ontario Health Coalition along with C.U.P.E Tuesday to speak about his opposition to the increasing competition being introduced into Britain's National Health Service. Dobson cautions the Ontario political parties that competitive privatized health care is not the way to go.

Dobson outlined the significant increase in the cost of bureaucracy with the new system. Where the British health service once spent 4 per cent of its total budget on paperwork, it now spends 15 per cent, which is the equivalent of about 32 billion Canadian dollars.

"Under a system of competition where the money has to follow the patient, the hospitals have to keep a detailed log of everything that’s spent on each patient. To get that put down, include it in a bill, properly calculate it, then using a computerized system to code it, sending it off to the part of the health care system that files the money. The outfit that finds the money will have to check those bills that it receives. It will challenge some of those bills that it receives, all sorts of accountants and lawyers will be involved."

Dobson says that by setting specific prices for particular operations and regulating that hospitals get down to those figures, Ontario is already bringing in a competitive system and that bureaucratic costs will massively rise. Dobson also spoke of Conservative John Tory's plans to farm some of the work out to private sector clinics.

If that happens it will be the same as what has happened in Britain. They will do the simple, less risky, less costly operations leaving the Medicare hospitals with the complex work such as providing the intensive care and high dependency units, dealing with accidents and emergencies and the private sector wont be doing that. That will increase the unit cost of every operation that the Medicare hospitals are doing and that will be very damaging."

Dobson outlined some of the repercussions to the policy in Britain, such as Health Service hospitals going into debt and round the clock protests all over the country. Protests that came to include no less than 8 of the government's own ministers. Repercussions that Dobson foresees for Ontario if politicians go ahead with a competitive system. He says even if politicians don't care about what happens to patients and health care staff, they should at least care about their own popularity, which he says will no doubt drop.

"3 members of the cabinet have been involved in protests outside their local hospitals! That’s something unique and it just shows how unpopular this policy is."

Dobson thinks that Canada and Britain's health care systems are part of what hold our countries together.

"They don't just bind our wounds, they bind us together as a society. To break up the health care system would be damaging, not just to health care system but to our society because it would be fragmenting one of the things that holds us together."