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Ontario Health Coalition campaigning against private clinics

U.S. company Copeman Healtcare Inc. planning to set up shops in Ontario

 

Toronto (13 Jan. 2006) - The Ontario Health Coalition has launched a campaign against private health clinics to be opened in Ottawa, London and Toronto by Copeman Healthcare Inc., a private U.S health care company that opened a similar clinic last November in Vancouver.

One of the major goals of the campaign is to raise the issue with candidates who are campaigning for Canada's Jan. 23 federal election. The group has prepared a list of questions it is urging voters to ask candidates before election day.

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is calling on all parties during the campaign to protect the country's public medicare system and to sign its Medicare Contract. A People's Contract

The clinics will charge the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) for the services they provide while also charging patients additional out-of-pocket initiation fees of $1,200 plus $2,300 annual dues for enhanced or boutique health services.

Challenge in the works

“This pay-your-way to enhanced healthcare for the wealthy violates the spirit and intent of the Canada Health Act and the public Medicare system,” says Natalie Mehra director of the Ontario Health Coalition. “We have been in contact with our lawyers and are investigating avenues for a challenge.”

Adrianna Tetley, executive director of the Association of Ontario Health Centres (AOHC), saus private clinics are inefficient compared to existing public alternatives.

“In addition to billing the public system, these centres propose to charge membership fees that will make their services almost 4,000 times more expensive to the client than nearly identical services offered at no added cost through non-profit community health centres,” she noted.

“These clinics will also suck doctors and other health professionals out of the public system. There are public solutions to our Medicare concerns, and the Ontario government has seized upon this already through a 60% increase in the number of community health centres by 2007-08. That is the sort of measure that is needed, enhancing capacity and innovation in the public, non-profit health system, instead of merely putting money into the pockets of profit-seekers.”

Ontario law

Mehra says those who seek to profit from such clinics need to be reminded that "Ontario law prohibits them from barring access to physician services if patients refuse to pay any 'block fee'."

"We also remind them that they are not allowed under the Canada Health Act to charge user fees for medically necessary physician services," added Natalie Mehra.

"We will be extremely vigorous in our defense of these protections. They are critical to ensure Ontarians’ equal access to health services based on need not ability to pay. This is the basic principle of our public health system achieved a generation ago by Canadians.” NUPGE

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