Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, unveiled a plan today for privately run surgery clinics. His entire reasoning for doing that could have been met by unveiling the same plan for publicly run surgery clinics. He did not explain at all why they would better be run by capitalists.

Yes, the initial capital costs of setting up and maintaining the buildings and equipment for the clinics would be paid by private investors but they would only do that because they would eventually make a profit on it, to be paid by the public. That wouldn’t save any money, it would cost more, which would go into the private investors pockets.

There’s no fundamental reason why it could be done faster by private businesses than public: we could even hire the same people to do that.

The only way the operations of these clinics could cost less is if they can get away with paying less money to the staff. There is no reason I would take less money simply because I’d rather be employed by a private company than by the government. I suspect that the main issue is that government staff would almost certainly be members of the provincial workers’ union and so would be in a better position to bargain for higher pay and benefits. But how would paying staff less help with the staff shortage which is one of the supposed reasons for this shift?

Although the article says that some people are concerned that doctors, nurses and other staff will leave hospitals to work in these facilities, that is just as likely if the exact same facilities are owned by the public, if the pay is the same.

There’s no reason to think supplies would be any cheaper for them than for the Province. They are more likely to cost more because the Province would buy in much larger quantities than individual clinics and so could get discounts.

For these reasons, the entire move to private clinics is bound to cost the public more unless they can offer additional services and charge them directly to patients, which Ford insists won’t be allowed. The same Ford who promised several times not to allow building on the green belt but now is doing exactly that.

The only people who will benefit from private ownership are those private owners who will face exactly the same costs as if the public owned the clinics and they will expect to make a profit, which means the total cost will be higher.

So the public will pay more and have less control.

I do not know whether this is simply willful ignorance on the part of the Ford government, because of his conservative ideological convictions, or knowingly enriching private interests at public expense. He has no mandate for that. It is corruption, even if he does not get paid directly, he will benefit from future good will from those he is enriching, even if it is just admittance to their social circles.

This logic is not just Ford’s invention; the British government are doing the same with their National Health Service. In both cases, the government has under-spent on health care in the face of the pandemic and now claims that the only fix is private capital. This pattern has been documented in great detail with many examples in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It seems that too many of our political leaders have adopted it as a textbook.

We can only expect more, if we allow this first step towards privatization has taken root and become the norm. We already have private health insurance companies, with policies mostly employment related, because we stopped the progress of public health care before we got dental, mental, pharmaceutical and more coverage. They are eager to step in to pay for any extra services these private clinics can provide and another disaster will be found to enable them to move us all to the disastrous over-priced healthcare system found in the USA.