Scotland's national health system is all public and a world leader. Can someone please tell Ford?

Waterloo Region Health Coalition put together a summary of the Scottish system. Scotland’s NHS is a leading example of publicly funded high-quality care and efficiency.

Personal computers, cell phones, and iPads have made our world smaller. But the onset of COVID literally shut down the entire world. That made most of us reliant on our ‘little machines’ in order to stay current, attend meetings as well as continue important conversations and activist work.

It’s good, in the sense, that many of us were able to work from home and redirect commuting time to advocacy and organizing. Grassroots organizations were able to ramp up, and in many cases, we found ourselves ‘attending’ conferences, meetings and ‘social’ gatherings that would have been unfathomable due to distance or time restrictions.

But despite innovative technologies and programs, some of us have found our worlds getting smaller, not including a range of voices and ideas, and our personal growth is stagnating.

Small Change is all about finding new voices, ideas and movements that are working to make more inclusive, caring communities and sharing that information.

While the organizations may be area specific, that doesn’t mean another community can’t piggy back on the foundational work and start a similar group tailored to meet the needs of their community.

Let’s start with the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), a network of over 400 grassroots community organizations across Ontario.

OHC works to protect and improve universal public health care in Ontario and to strengthen the principles of the Canada Health Act (CHA).

OHC and CHA share core values of equality, democracy, social inclusion and social justice. They also are committed to the five principles of the CHA including universality, comprehensiveness, portability, accessibility, and public administration.

The non-profit, non-partisan public interest activist coalition and network empowers members to become actively engaged in making public policy on matters related to our public health care system.

They provide amazing  information about Ontario’s health care system, programs, and services in order to protect the system from provincial government cuts, delisting and privatization.

OHC is holding a referendum in May where Ontarians can let their voices be heard. The vote will be an opportunity to let the Ford government know that you support publicly funded universal health care.

The plan is for 1,000,000 people to let Ford know that they don’t want health care privatized because they realize that privatization leads to longer wait times, less desirable outcomes and financial hardship.

To accomplish this feat, OHC is looking for volunteers. Check out the list of chapters across the province to find the local health coalition nearest you.

In May I spoke with Natalie Mehra, Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition, about the privatization of long-term care (LTC) homes in Ontario.

During the height of COVID the average death rate in private, for-profit LTC homes was 5.7%. Non-profit LTC homes were at 2,8%, while municipal facilities were at 1.4%.

Over 60% o Ontario’s LTC facilities are private, for-profit. They are notoriously understaffed at the best of times, fail inspections, and are responsible for over 4,000 deaths during COVID.

Those deaths were not all COVID related. Many were from neglect, dehydration, and malnutrition. The result of corporations, and boards of directors, putting profits over people.

In the aftermath, the Ford government issued 30-year licenses and expansions for 18,000 additional LTC beds to some of the worst private, for-profit LTC facilities. These were the corporately run homes that had to have the Canadian army sent in to deal with the chaos and assist traumatized residents – many of whom were transferred to local hospitals for treatment and care.

Hear my interview with Mehra: The Privatization of long-term care homes in Ontario must be stopped.

Redirecting public funds to private, for-profit health care is happening right across the spectrum of health care. It might shock some readers to learn that public funds going to private, corporate health care is happening at a time when overall public funding for universal health care in Ontario is the lowest in Canada.

In other words, the Ford government has tax dollars for private corporations, but not for publicly funded health care.

This is such an important podcast!!! So, find 20 mins to hear Resh Budhu speak with JP Hornick, President of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), and palliative care physician and health justice activist, Dr. Naheed Dosani.

Hornick and Dosani make it so easy to understand how the Ford government has created, and put into overdrive, the crisis in public health care that will affect every Ontarian without private health care coverage – think the USA.

However, health care hope and salvation looms large on the horizon in the form of The Scottish Public Health Care System. This entirely publicly funded system has space for absolutely no privatization and is thriving – especially when compared with the disastrously corrupt, inefficient and virtually bankrupt private, for-profit English health care system.

Waterloo Region Health Coalition put together a summary of the Scottish system. Scotland’s national health system (NHS) is a world leading example of how high-quality care and efficiency can be achieved when the focus is on maintaining public infrastructure while rejecting all forms of privatization.

To get an overview of just how invaluable publicly funded universal health care is take out Life Before Medicare from your local library.

The Ontario Coalition of Seniors Citizens’ Organizations collected the lived experiences of people from across Canada to lay bare just how bad it was in the ‘good old days’ when we had to pay for health care.

An experience that may haunt you, as it does me, is a woman retelling life as a child on a Saskatchewan farm when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Because the mother knew that cancer treatment and pain medication would bankrupt her family, she went without.

Instead, the kids were sent out to the fields but they could still hear their mother’s screams of pain. No one should have to endure such agony. Universal health care is a human right.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “The right to health for all people means that everyone should have access to the health services they need, when and where they need them, without suffering financial hardship.

No one should get sick and die just because they are poor, or because they cannot access the health services they need.”

And, if that doesn’t motivate you to join the OHC fight to save universal health care in Ontario, then I have no idea what would!

Endnote: JP Hornick mentioned the privatization of plasma, and eventually blood, collection so here’s information explaining why plasma and blood collection should never be privatized through the sale of collection rights to foreign corporations.