The (Ontario Health) coalition, which advocates for improvements to the public health care system, is documenting experiences like Zammit’s at hearings around rural Ontario this month. With input from opposition critics, the network of over 400 grassroot organizations wants to draft recommendations on how to improve local hospitals, especially in rural areas.

Executive director Natalie Mehra said it will follow their report last year, which recorded almost 1,200 emergency room closures in the province.

“The goal is to push the Ford government and stop them from continuing to shut down and dismantle public health services and sort of destroy them through privatization,” said Mehra.

The province is budgeted to spend $85 billion on health care this year, she noted.

Zammit said she didn’t see that funding reflected on the ground.

  • rekabis
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    11 days ago

    Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.

    Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.

    Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.

    That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
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      11 days ago

      The problem is that this country is fucking brain-dead and tries to elect conservatives federally every chance they can. Shit, there’s an actual chance somebody as against the general public as Poilivere could be elected. There are actually working class folk out there absolutely excited to fuck themselves and everybody else over by electing him in. Every point they make against Trudeau will very possibly continue or be worse under PP yet they’re out there with raging truck boners hopping to vote him in.

      And that has the potential to fuck the entire country over for healthcare instead of just a few lobotomized provinces.

      Be careful what you wish for.