Monday, October 29, 2001
For Immediate Release

                 Senate Committee Report Fatally Biased:
                         Ontario Health Coalition

Toronto



· The Ontario Health Coalition, in partnership with other
concerned community groups, are planning a lively protest today at noon
at the Royal York Hotel: the site of the hearings into the future of
Medicare for the Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science
and Technology. The committee recently released a report titled, ·Issues
and Options· ostensibly about the options facing our health system.
Coalition spokespeople called the report "fatally biased" noting that it
ignores public options, really only looking in detail at options for
creating two tiers and privatizing Medicare. The report was planned as
number four out of five that the Senate committee intends to release but
was released early, presumably to impact the work of the Romanow
Commission. Senator Kirby, committee chair and Board member of
Extendicare Inc. has been travelling across the country promoting
privatization of Medicare in the national media and predicting the
demise of the Medicare system if Canadians do not support his position.

·It is an outrage that this board member of a huge multinational private
health company, not elected by anyone, and without bothering to provide
a single shred of evidence to support his claims, is traipsing around
the country using his Senate Committee position as a platform from which
to tell Canadians that public Medicare is on its last legs and we have
to privatize,· charged Irene Harris, coalition co-chair.  ·The irony of
ironies is that he is proposing ·solutions· like user-fees and two-tier
health care ·  the very things that worked so badly that they brought
about the creation of public Medicare in the first place.·

Three key items missing from the report:
1)  The committee·s paper suggests that Canadians over-use so called
free healthcare services. It uses this presumption to justify a series
of two-tier privatizations stating that Canadians need to be ·trained or
given incentives which help them discriminate between their true needs
for health services and their desired demand·.  The report does not
bother to give any evidence that Canadians are - or if we are, to what
degree we are - in fact, overusing the health system.

2) The report neglects to give any evidence whatsoever that a tier of
profit-seeking health care would improve cost, efficiency or quality of
care. It ignores international and Canadian evidence that two-tier
Medicare makes waiting lists longer. It ignores the American experience
of health care privatization - even though many of the same corporations
would be in operation in Canada if we privatized.  Similarly, the report
ignores cost escalations in countries that have privatized healthcare,
including Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.  The report dismisses
outright any possibility of taking a closer look at gaining efficiencies
through containing or eliminating the privatization that currently
exists · opting to dump the responsibility for system change on patients
rather than on health care profiteers. Authors blatantly show their bias
by lauding health privatization as ·thinking outside the box·.

3) The case for public financing of health care is not investigated.
Instead, much ink is spent on a listing of all the ways the authors
could think to privatize the financing of health services.

For more information: Natalie Mehra 416-441-2502 (office), 416-230-6402
(cell).