For nearly fifty years now, we have been buying the myth that the private sector can do anything better than the government. The pandemic has exposed that myth for the lie it is. What has been happening in our long term care homes is the most painful example of that lie. Linda McQuaig writes:
Privatization has become a kind of economic dogma in recent years, with business commentators and politicians routinely asserting that the private sector is more efficient and always does things better -- an assertion that is rarely accompanied by any evidence.
In fact, the crucial difference separating the private and public sectors is that the private sector is focused on profit-making. Indeed, this is the only real purpose of a business enterprise.
So, regardless of what industry spokespeople say, a private company in the nursing home business is focused on maximizing profits, as its board of directors demands.
What has happened in Ontario starkly illustrates the primacy of profit over care:
Certainly, Ontario's three big private nursing home chains, which receive government funding under the same formula as not-for-profit homes, have been good at maximizing profits.
Over the past decade, the three chains paid out $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders and $138 million in executive pay, according to the Star investigation.
The chains insist these payouts come out of profits they earn selling private services to residents in these and other retirement homes, which are not funded by government.
In fact, it's hard to know exactly what's going on, since the government is notoriously lax in its regulations and oversight of the industry -- as the pandemic vividly illustrates.
This laxness appears to be traceable back to Mike Harris, the former Conservative premier whose government removed minimum staffing levels for nursing homes in the late 1990s and encouraged the involvement of private businesses.
Long term care homes have been kind to Harris:
After retiring from politics in 2002, Harris has profited handsomely from the lucrative private nursing home industry he helped create, serving as chairman of Chartwell Retirement Residences, one of the three big chains. (His annual salary for this part-time position is $229,500, and he has $4.4 million in Chartwell holdings.)
Over the past decade, Chartwell paid its executives $47.3 million and distributed $798 million to shareholders.
Meanwhile, in the 28 nursing homes Chartwell owns or operates in Ontario, the COVID-19 infection rate has been 47 per cent higher and the fatality rate 68 per cent higher than the provincial average, according to the Star investigation.
COVID has been a myth buster. After the pandemic, the old myths won't sell.
Image: torontocitynews.ca
12 comments:
For nearly fifty years now, we have been buying the myth that the private sector can do anything better than the government.
Speak for yourself. :)
I have always thought that G. B. Shaw had a good point.
That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity.
Preface, The Doctor's Dilemma.
There are cases where the private sector and free enterprise makes sense and circumstances where public services or very highly regulated monopolies as in the old Bell Canada in Ontario and Quebec is better approach.
My butcher and my local pub are great private solutions. Private nursing homes or private prison are crazy ideas.
This is the key point: Ontario's private nursing home chains receive government funding under the same formula as not-for-profit homes. Canada funds long-term care homes at some of the lowest levels in the developed world. Ontario's LTCH are already chronically underfunded, and before Covid hit Ford was threatening further cuts. Yet, the for-profit sector manages to extract from that hundreds of millions in shareholder dividends every year and tens of millions in executive compensation.
The Canadian Armed Forces were appalled at conditions they found when they were called in to help at Ontario's LTCHs in the spring. Brig. Gen. Mialowski reported that people die of starvation, of dehydration, and in their own feces infected with bed sores. It's not uncommon for residents to get one shower a week. Nurses and care workers still complain of lack of PPE. No wonder Covid rips through these places like a tornado.
The "care" in Ontario's LTCHs, especially its for-profit ones, amounts to elder abuse. But instead of prosecutions, Ford is intent on passing Bill 218 to retroactively protect these bad actors from Covid-related lawsuits! Other than a few op-eds from the registered nurses association and seniors advocates, there's hardly a murmur. It's clear that as a society, we simply don't care for or value seniors. What does that say about us?
Cap
I agree wholeheartedly, jrk. There is room for both private and public enterprize. But the notion that one is always better than the other is one of the fallacies of our age.
The fact that we have allowed this abuse to go on for such a long time speaks volumes about our callousness, Cap.
When you hang the almighty dollar over the head of any human being, the human always loses, Owen. Here in B.C., the BC "Liberals" better known as Lieberals, the minister of everything Rich Coleman was busy busy selling off every LTC operation he could. I read that one of the last ones he peddled to the private sector, his designated purchaser couldn't come up with the financing so he merely used taxpayers $$ to finance this latest sale!
Like Ontario under Harris, they also changed labour laws, hours of work that constituted full or equivalent full time work which is what led to all these minimum wage earners having to work at several locations in order to cobble together the equivalent of full time, but this set-up denied them important benefits such as holiday pay, sick time, etc.
This is the level of value our right wing politicians place on not only the important work these (mostly foreign) workers carry out, but the value they place on the lives of the very seniors that worked so hard in their lifetime to make Canada a country where people immigrating from other countries wanted to make their home. Shame on them all!
These are the folks who built this country -- who went to war for this country, Lulymay. They are not a commodity that can be used to generate a profit.
When anyone involved in politics, whether elected or part of the civil service states that the private sector can run everything better than government then they are admitting they personally are totally incompetent and unqualified!
And they're admitting they've been brainwashed, Rob.
A bit OT but Doug Ford seems to be frothing at the mouth over the Auditor General's report on the provincial response to the Covid-19 pandemic. https://auditor.on.ca/
I have managed to read the first chapter and am looking forward to the second and third. To date, it appears that the Liberal Gov'ts' neglected emergency response planning; the Tories continued the tradition and then threw out what planning there was when the pandemic hit and hired a consultant. It gets worse.
Exactly, jrk. Things aren't getting better. They're getting worse.
In a striking case of serendipity I ran into an article on the privatization of public assets in Australia. https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/paying-for-what-we-used-to-own-the-strange-case-of-csl,14558
In 30 years of privatization in Australia, there has not been a single case where the public would not have been at least as well off if the asset had remained in public ownership.
The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories saga reminds me of Connaught Labs that eventually was privatized under the Mulroney Gov't.
Only those with short memories -- or short life spans -- think that public corporations can't be well run, jrk.
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