Doug Ford is in the cat bird's seat. Linda McQuaig writes:
With our health-care system reeling, Ford is charging ahead with plans for further privatization — Ontario health care is already 40 per cent private — and selling this as a way to save the system through “innovation.”
This is just silly corporate-speak. The system’s problems have been thoroughly studied by countless commissions and the solutions do not involve privatization.
Certainly Ford’s plan to allow private medical companies to perform surgeries, paid for by government, isn’t the way to solve the medical backlog.
Ford's key maxim is that the private system works better than the public one. But that maxim doesn't apply to healthcare:
Ontario has lots of unused hospital operating rooms, idled after years of cutbacks. Instead of bringing them back into use, Ford plans to divert public dollars to private facilities. But these private companies will take 10 to 15 per cent in profits and pay high management fees, so they’ll cut corners to the detriment of patients.
That’s what corporations do — they devise ways to maximize profit for their shareholders. That’s their mandate, their reason for existing.
And when they’re allowed access to the public trough — where payment is assured and they don’t have to worry about competition — they’ve hit the corporate sweetspot. For all the hoopla about the rigour of the private sector, what businesses actually seek is a comfortable niche in a competition-free zone with a reliable source of revenue. Thank you, medicare!
It's called Disaster Capitalism. Milton Friedman proclaimed that situations such as the ones we currently face are precisely the time to implement "market solutions."
And Dougie is just the man to do it.
Image: Twitter
