The situation is extremely urgent
Come to the Ontario Legislature
Wednesday October 29
At stake is our single tier public medicare & the services and funding in our local public hospitals. Don’t let Ford destroy them.
We cannot let two-tier medicare and the charging of patients thousands of dollars for surgeries and diagnostic tests to become normalized. We are on the cusp of it now. If we don’t fight back we are going to lose public Medicare.
Planning to attend? Please RSVP as soon as possible by emailing back in response to this email (to info@OntarioHC.ca) with your name and the town/city you are from. If you are carpooling, please send us the names and towns of anyone else who is attending. This information is a requirement for Queen’s Park security and they need at least 24 hours notice, so please RSVP by Monday, October 27 at 12 p.m. noon. We also need this information so you can be welcomed from the floor of the Legislature.
Two Groups of Local 707 members are heading out on Go Train
Oakville Group arrive at the Oakville Go Station at 7:30 am on the North side of the Terminal entering from Cross Avenue to take the 7:44 am Lakeshore West Train
Burlington Group arrive at the Burlington Go Station at 7:05 am on South side Terminal entering from Fairview St -to take the 7:26 am Lakeshore West Train
Ford is not stopping. He is now accelerating his hospital privatization. This summer, Ford has announced 57 new private clinics that will take more than 100,000 diagnostic tests out of local public hospitals– along with funding and staffing. The plan is to expand them to do surgeries. Ford is no longer hiding his intentions. His government is essentially building private day hospitals and they are shifting hundreds of millions in public funding over to them.
Nothing has happened to stop the private clinics that are violating our medicare laws, undermining the Canada Health Act, and demonstrating a complete lack of medical ethics.
Remember when Premier Ford promised that no patient would ever have to pay with their credit card, only their OHIP card? When asked if patients would have to pay anything if they had surgery at a private clinic, Ford said it would be “100 per cent” covered. “We’re never gonna waver from that,” he said. Those claims are completely untrue.
Wednesday, October 29 Itinerary (more details to come)
9:00 a.m. Arrive at Queen’s Park security (or as soon after 9 a.m. as you can)
9 – 9:30 a.m. Start to go through security to fill the Public Galleries in the Legislature
10:00 a.m. Fill the Public Galleries.
We will be welcomed in the Legislature by various political parties and MPPs.
Watch Question Period where the Premier and Health Minister will have to answer questions from the Opposition Parties about what they are doing
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Press conference in the media studio of the Legislature
2:00 p.m. We will be finished and ready to leave at this time
Directions
By public transit: From Union Station -go to Queen’s Park station on the Line 1 Yonge-University subway line.
By road: There is street parking on Hoskins Ave. near Queen’s Park Circle. There is also parking on Grosvenor Street near Queen’s Park Circle. Joining Grosvenor, there is street parking on Surrey Place and Grenville Street and also a parking lot at Women’s College Hospital and a parking building almost next door to the east of it. There are also parking lots behind Mount Sinai Hospital, an underground at University Health Network (Toronto General Hospital/Peter Munk Cardiac Centre) and on Elizabeth Street behind Toronto General Hospital/the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre.
A final note:
We HAVE to build a fightback that is commensurate to the threat
We cannot be naïve. The forces that oppose public medicare in our province are in power. The first step is to hand over control of our hospital services to private and for-profit entities that lobby the government for contracts. That is in process. Then the Ford government has purposely chosen to let the private clinics bill OHIP plus upcharge patients. Now they are purposely refusing to take action when those clinics turn upselling of medically unnecessary procedures into extra-billing, charging user fees, lying about wait times in public hospitals, and manipulative upselling and coercion to get patients to pay extra on top, because that is how the private clinics maximize their profits.
The next step? The demand for private health insurance to cover all the extra charges will get stronger and stronger as people find out they have to pay. Those of you who are in unions will face demands to bargain health benefits to cover the extra charges. Those benefits will reduce your ability to bargain real increases in wages. For those of you who are non-unionized workers, the elderly and others, there will be no option.
The suffering and inequities that led to the creation of Public Medicare are already on their way back in for elderly patients trying to get cataract surgeries. We have heard from an 85 year old who had to take out a loan to get her surgery and now she is struggling to pay it back from her pension. We heard from a 71 year old who had to go back to work to pay for his surgery. We have heard from seniors who have been told that they have to pay $8,000, $10,000, $11,000 for their eye surgery. Imagine what will happen when we have 57 more private clinics doing thousands of MRIs, CTs, endoscopies, and hip, knee and shoulder surgeries and more. This is just the beginning, unless we are strong enough and relentless enough to stop it.
Ontario Health Coalition, 201-15 Gervais Dr, Toronto, ON M3C 1Y8 | T: 416-441-2502 |
https://www.OntarioHealthCoalition.ca/ | https://tr.ee/V7m60V
In Solidarity,
Mark Sciberras
President Unifor Local 707
