Recently, the provincial government announced a $200 million bailout for Ontario hospitals. Despite this, and the new Health Tax, hospitals will still operate $440 million in the red, according to the Ontario Hospital Association, and may have to lay off 8,700 workers to balance their books, including 2000 nurses.

What does this mean for your local hospital The government would like to see more "community-based" health services spring up to fill in the gaps caused by layoffs. But there is no indication this will happen before hospital services are cut. The bottom line: Ontario taxpayers will continue to suffer from reduced services while their taxes keep rising.

To curb costs, the government must increase private sector involvement. First, it should mandate the outsourcing of hospital jobs where this work can be performed les expensively than by government employees. Apparently, there is a lot of room to do this. A report this year by the Fraser Institute showed that many unionized hospital employees, such as security personnel, food workers and cleaners receive more money (in some cases one-and-a-half times more) than workers performing comparable jobs in the private sector. The report also showed that Ontario hospital employees are overpaid compared with their counterparts in other provinces.

In British Columbia, the government contracted out services and reduced its health care budget by 4.5 per cent from the previous year. Similar measures in Ontario could yield potential savings of $1.4 billion. Add this amount to the $824 million pledged by the federal government at its last First Ministers Meeting on health and Ontario would almost be able to eliminate the provincial Health Tax without any reduction in services.

In the long term, however, Ontario must go further, and urge the federal government to amend the Canada Health Act to permit the development of a parallel private health care system. This would take the pressure off a chronically under funded public system and allow the province to maintain both health spending and spending in other areas.

Other nations such as Sweden, France, Britain, New Zealand and many more deliver
services through both public and private means. Here at home, the province of Quebec has over 50 private for-profit clinics operating alongside public hospitals, and Alberta Premier Ralph Klein has talked openly about the need for more private delivery to improve the system.

Yet in Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty has chosen to hike taxes, delist service, force hospitals to lay off nurses, and use precious public dollars to buy our perfectly functional private MRI clinics. He is putting the interests of public sector unions ahead of citizens' interests by not outsourcing over-priced services. Ontarians are paying more and getting less, in the name of this government's ideology of forced rationing of health care. Waiting lists have become so long that Canadians are traveling to countries like India and Germany to pay and receive treatments.

This shameful situation cannot be allowed to continue. Establishing a parallel private health care system would not make us less caring, or less Canadians. It would not mean that we would create an American system where people are uninsured. It would simply ensure that people would have more options and get better care at less cost.

Ontarians and their hospitals deserve better. If the government can't fund health care, they should free it - and let the private sector provide choice and quality services. Now that's a recipe for a healthy Ontario.

Tasha Kheiriddin
CTF Ontario Director