The Devil In Ms. Jones

To those 57%  who couldn't rouse themselves to vote in the last Ontario election, please do not make sounds of outrage over the likelihood that Doug Ford will introduce more privatization into our healthcare system. You didn't participate, so I really have little regard for your thoughts on the matter. Electoral silence, in my view, gives consent.

Sylvia Jones, our new Minister of Health, is starting to use the word innovation a great deal, which many see as code for privatization. Indeed, one can well-imagine that one of her early innovations will benefit the many private operators of long-term care facilities including, of course, the Chair of Chartwell Homes, the infamous Mike Harris.

Here is one of the brilliant ideas Ms. Jones is sharing:

Jones and Long-Term Care Minister Paul Calandra will outline a spate of “operational” reforms Thursday morning at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

One move, first reported by CityNews and confirmed by the Star, is to make permanent a pandemic emergency measure that allows the moving of patients in hospitals awaiting a long-term care bed to nursing homes in other communities.

Progressive Conservative sources said the decision to transport elderly people to an available bed elsewhere would be left up to doctors and could free up some 250 hospital beds by year’s end.

A bloodless solution, eh, unless you happen to be an essential caregiver to the relocated senior, likely a senior yourself.

I won't bore you with the details of how, despite the mantra that private enterprise always does things more efficiently, the private model is more a shell game than a solution; you probably already understand it is merely rearranging those deck chairs on the Titanic and ultimately confining many to the steerage section to await their doom.

I'll let the always entertaining and infinitely more witty Brittlestar speak for me.