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FORUM: Our health-care crisis deepens (Jan. 2026)

March 9th, 2026 · No Comments

The situation only worsens under Doug Ford’s policies

By Jessica Bell

What is happening to health care? 

One of the Ontario government’s most important responsibilities is to provide Ontarians with high quality and cost-effective public health care. The Ford government is not effectively delivering on this mandate. 

Private health care is proliferating.

There are about 900 privately operated clinics in Ontario.  Most of these clinics offer diagnostics, like MRIs and ultrasounds. Now the Conservatives are permitting for-profit companies to perform eye surgery and hip and knee replacements.  

The minister has said these for-profit clinics will alleviate the surgery backlog and that “Ontarians will always access the health care they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card.”    

This is not true Many patients at these for-profit clinics are being coerced into paying for medically necessary care. This is illegal. 

Last November, I listened to Dr. James Deutsch talk about the experience of his now-deceased wife who was charged $7,850 for cataract surgery at a private clinic.  

Dr. Deutsch is one of hundreds of people working with the Ontario Health Coalition to file a complaint with the government and demand these clinics reimburse them for costs.  

“I believe that they took advantage of her desperate situation and convinced her to opt for a more expensive lens and type of procedure for each eye,” Dr. Deutsch said.

“She was scared to go walking outside. She was not in a position to question. Having the profit incentive and leeway to charge more for a procedure can lead to situations like this, of selling services that are not necessary.” 

These clinics are a colossal waste of money because the Conservatives have permitted these for-profit clinics to charge the government much higher rates than hospitals can bill for the same surgery. 

As one surgeon described it to the CBC last November: “If I were running that centre, I would be a millionaire. There’s a ton of money to be made.”  

It is for more efficient and beneficial for the Ontario government to invest in public health-care delivery and to properly fund our public hospital system.  

The family doctor shortage is getting worse.

In December, the auditor general released a sobering report on the state of primary care. She found that two million people in Ontario do not have family doctors or primary care nurses, up from 1.8 million just a year prior.  

The auditor general found the government also has no clear plan to connect every Ontarian to a primary care provider by 2029.

The government doesn’t know how many providers are practicing in each region of the province because they don’t properly track it.   

The government is not creating enough medical spots for family doctors because they did a poor job of assessing the need and underestimated how many people don’t have a doctor.  You can’t fix what you don’t track. 

Under the guidance of former federal Health Minister Jane Philpott, the government has issued two rounds of funding to community clinics and family health teams—popular primary care models— to bring in new patients living in areas with acute primary care shortages.  

Ontario should increase its investment in primary care, especially nurse practitioner-delivered care and the family health team model.  

Physician overbilling is a problem

Most physicians carefully follow OHIP billing rules, and then there are some outliers that don’t.

The auditor general has found there are some doctors who are billing for more than 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  These doctors are billing up to ten times more than other doctors in their speciality.  

OHIP billing abuse has been an issue for years, so why aren’t we addressing it?

To maintain trust in our OHIP billing system, it is essential that we rout out abuse. Currently, there are just 8 staff in Ontario monitoring OHIP billing charges of $29 billion a year. One practical solution is to increase the number of staff responsible for auditing and enforcing OHIP billing practices so they can identify and crack down on abuse. 

We need a cost-effective and high-quality public health-care system that provides comprehensive cradle to grave health care based on need, not on our ability to pay.  That’s the Canadian way. 

Jessica Bell is the MPP for University-Rosedale and the Shadow Minister for Finance and the Treasury Board. You can reach her office at jbell-co@ndp.on.ca or 416-535-7206.

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Tags: Annex · Columns · Opinion

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