Healthcare Funding Means Cuts are Coming

Details: Published on Wednesday, 05 June 2019 10:12; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1827 ... May 17, 2019
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Healthcare Funding Means Cuts are Coming

Doug Allan

The group that will do the best out of the recent provincial Budget are the doctors. According to the just released Budget Estimates, OHIP funding (which goes overwhelmingly to physicians and practitioners) will go up $1.2-billion or 8 per cent compared to last year’s Estimates.

This large increase is likely due to the February 2019 interest arbitration award for doctors, an award that was praised as "fair" by Christine Elliott, the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care. The Financial Accountability Office estimates the award will increase OHIP payments to doctors over a billion by 2019/20 and by $1.496-billion by 2020/21. That’s roughly about a 12.5% increase in OHIP funding for doctors over four years.

This... news comes as the government is pushing -- possibly with an attack on free collective bargaining -- to reduce the settlements for workers in the broader provincial public sector.

The government puts total compensation for all the hundreds of thousands of employees in the broader provincial public sector at $60-billion. So $1.496-billion would equal a 2.5 per cent increase in total compensation for the hundreds of thousands of broader provincial public sector employees in the province.

Hospital operating funding is budgeted to increase $384-million this fiscal year -- about a 2 per cent increase. This is about the same as the increases during the years of Liberal austerity and falls about 3 per cent below cost pressures.