I was interested in reading this morning's paper, specifically the article on Public Health Funding. I would love to hear your comments about this (from around the world!).
Julia D-V
(Because the URL is so long, I have included the text - this is intended to be a courtesy).
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1084486210057&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154
Budget to boost public health
Province plans to take on 75 per cent of costs by 2007
Greater role follows inquiry recommendations
CAROLINE MALLAN
QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU CHIEF
Ontario's Liberal government will shoulder more responsibility for local public health units when it unveils its first budget on Tuesday.
Finance Minister Greg Sorbara will announce that the province will increase its share of the budgets of Ontario's 37 local public health units to 75 per cent from 50 per cent by 2007.
The rest of the budget for local public health is picked up by municipalities, which are supported by local ratepayers through their property taxes.
The move is an attempt to help municipalities better cope with crises such as last year's SARS outbreak or the campaign to battle West Nile virus. It also addresses problems caused by the Tory downloading of responsibilities to municipalities.
The SARS outbreak that killed 44 people in the GTA exposed a public health system that was underfunded and ill-prepared to deal with a major health crisis. Based on government estimates for this year's public health unit funding, the planned move by the Liberal government will cost an extra $103 million a year when fully implemented for total annual spending of $308 million, up from the current $205 million annually.
It is unclear how much of the province's public health contribution will be spent in the coming year, but it is expected that most of the increase will come in the later stages of the Liberal mandate, with Tuesday's cash viewed as a downpayment on an election promise.
"Instead of taking an `all say and no pay' approach like the Tories, we are taking real responsibility for public health and promoting a healthier Ontario," said one government source, who labelled the increase as a plan to, "reverse the damage caused by a generation of inaction and inattention in public health."
Premier Dalton McGuinty told a business audience this week that despite inheriting a $5.6 billion deficit from the Tories, his government will proceed with a promise to improve health and education by spending more money.
McGuinty warned the audience of "sacrifices" to come in order to pay the bill for better services, but added that his government was "putting its shoulder" behind the plan.
The call on government to boost support for public health first came from the judicial inquiry into the Walkerton water disaster that killed seven people and left more then 2,300 ill after E.coli-tainted water made its way into the town's drinking water in May 2000.
Justice Dennis O'Connor's first recommendation was that every public health unit should have a full-time medical officer of health — a plan that has proven difficult to fulfil because of a lack of physicians interested in the job. A handful of vacancies remain in the province and are filled only on a part-time basis.
Four years after that tragedy, the Liberals say they will reverse the dramatic budget cuts implemented by the former Conservative government and return to their traditional funding partnership of 75 per cent with municipalities.
In his review of how the province responded to SARS released last month, Justice Archie Campbell lambasted the province for underfunding an essential service and called for the return to the former public health funding arrangement.
In his report, Campbell said the former Tory government laid off senior scientists as part of cost-cutting in the late 1990s — people who would have proven invaluable during the outbreak. "Ontario... slept through many wake-up calls. Again and again the systemic flaws were pointed out, again and again the very problems that emerged during SARS were predicted, again and again the warnings were ignored," Campbell wrote in his report. "SARS showed that Ontario's public health system is broken and needs to be fixed."
Health Minister George Smitherman labelled the Campbell report, a "passionate call to arms" and promised to unveil a comprehensive action plan on public health reform within the next two months.
Tuesday's budget money is expected to be the starting point.
A senior Liberal said the money will be spent to shore up a range of public health initiatives, including drinking water quality, infection control, tobacco and restaurant inspection as well as proactive initiatives like tackling obesity.
In 1998, the Tories attempted to download the entire cost of public health on to municipalities as part of widespread cost-cutting aimed at cutting the deficit. But after an outcry from local politicians, they retreated and agreed to pay half of the costs of local public health.
The first year those cuts came into effect, provincial spending on public health dropped $129 million from $148.7 million to just $19.7 million the next year, according to government public accounts documents.
Last summer, in the wake of the SARS crisis, the Association of Local Public Health Agencies predicted that health units needed about $120 million more a year to deliver all of the programs that public health agencies are supposed to offer.
Even with that money, the group said, there would not be enough money to pay for so-called "SARS swat teams" of outbreak containment experts that has been promised.
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