All across Canada austerity measures designed to reduce the deficit will cause major cuts in public Health care.
For instance in Ontario, the government plans to limit spending in healthcare to just a 2.1 per cent annual increase over the next three years. This barely surpasses inflation and is lower than the 2.5 per cent recommended by economists. Further it is a drastic change from the past eight years, which saw health spending increase by an average 6.1 per cent annually.
The Ontario government justifies these cuts because the deficit alone is projected to reach 15.2-billion in five years.
The consequences of these cuts will be severe and include worsening backlogs, longer wait times, and there will be more cancelled surgeries and medicine practiced in hallways.
Even though Health Minister Deb Matthews said that the above consequences will not happen, she acknowledged that the government had to make tough choices to re-balance the books.
“I’m asking everyone who works in health care to ask two questions,” she said.
“The first question is, what’s the best thing for the patients? The second thing is, what’s the best thing for the taxpayers? So we need to get better patient care and we need to get better value for money.”
Easier said than done to reduce funding while concurrently improving the quality of patient care. The government’s idea is to improve the efficiency of hospitals by lowering costs through specialization. The downside is smaller and rural hospitals won’t be able to compete with these large specialized centers. That will force these hospitals to drop these services and make patients travel further for care and wait longer for it.
The Ontario Health Coalition opposes the drastic cuts and says,” It is likely the idea of a fairly comprehensive, local community hospital would soon no longer exist. We know that they fulfill unique functions in those communities and we value the services that they provide in their communities. So it wouldn’t have been fair to put them in the same category as the large hospitals.”
On the bright side Elite Cardiology Group is doing what it can to allow hospitals to improve patient care and drawing money from a private source as opposed to solely relying on government funding.
Elite Cardiology Group does this by collecting used EP catheters from electrophysiology labs all across Ontario. This not only reduces waste management costs by reducing the amount of catheters sent to landfills but also increases revenue for the EP and Cath department.
Elite Cardiology group pays a rebate for each device it collects. With over 200 different diagnostic EP catheters, ablation catheters and Ultrasound catheters that are collectable EP/Cath departments can earn a significant amount of money. Further no additional staff is required to set up a recycling service because all the staff have to do is seal the devices in a ziplock bag and ship on Elite Cardiology Group’s account.
Hopefully, in the future Ontario’s deficit will be reduced and this province’s prospects won’t look so bleak. Until then Elite Cardiology Group will do what they can to help out.
