Medicine Canada

In the lobby of a grocery store in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto, a small group of perky women and one man are trying to thrust flyers into the hands of customers. Many shoppers, pushing carts and laden with bags, rush past them, assuming they’re soliciting donations or selling something.

But others stop short and react with incredulous delight when they hear what Vyshnave Jeyabalan is offering. “Excuse me,” Ms. Jeyabalan asks shopper after shopper, “do you have a family doctor?”

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Quebec will not publicly fund the first Health Canada-approved treatment for the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s disease after an expert committee concluded its benefits are too modest to improve patients’ lives.

The negative recommendation from Quebec’s National Institute for Excellence in Health and Social Services, known by the French acronym INESSS, marks the first time a government advisory body in Canada has evaluated whether the medication, lecanemab, should be paid for out of the public purse.

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(November 14, 2025)

By: Freq 90.5/Oldies 96.7 News staff

The Ontario Health Coalition is warning about the long-term consequences of health-care privatization, pointing to new research from overseas that it says mirrors decisions being made in Ontario today.

In reports released by Professor Allyson M. Pollock and Graham Kirkwood of Newcastle University, the research outlines how two decades of privatization in England — including shifting funding from the National Health Service (NHS) to private providers for surgeries such as knee, hip and cataract procedures — has led to reduced public capacity, longer wait times, and widening health inequalities. The findings note poorer and less healthy patients are waiting longer for care as a two-tier system emerges.

By contrast, Scotland expanded its NHS capacity without relying on private clinics and has not seen inequalities grow to the same extent.

Ontario Health Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra says those trends offer a cautionary example, adding Ontario is “about a decade behind” England but began down a similar path.

Pollock’s research also shows wealthier, healthier patients in England not only wait less for NHS-funded care but are more likely to be readmitted to public hospitals — displacing lower-income patients from the queue. Mehra says early signs of similar inequities are already appearing in Ontario. While private-sector patients in England experience shorter waits individually, the introduction of private providers has been linked to longer overall wait times for poorer and less healthy patients.

Mehra says Ontario private clinics can charge a 20 per cent premium for procedures such as cataract surgery — the same surgery that public hospitals can perform. She argues investments should prioritize the public system to move patients through care faster.

Link to original article: https://www.ptbotoday.ca/2025/11/14/95409/

(November 17, 2025)

By: BarrieToday Staff

Labour and health officials were in Barrie today to shed light on academic reports around privatization of hospital surgeries in England.

They say this led to growing inequality, longer wait times and disruption of services in the public health-care system.

Allyson Pollock, co-author of the reports and professor emerita at Newcastle University, has been investigating cataract, knee and hip surgeries in England and Scotland over a 20-year period.

She says the current system in England benefits wealthier patients who can "jump the queue" by accessing care at private, for-profit facilities, while the poorest and less healthy people suffer longer wait times for hip and knee surgery due to reduced capacity in public hospitals.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) says the reports contrast extensive privatization with Scotland, which continued to invest in public health care and was able to increase surgical rates without using the private sector.

The Ontario Health Coalition and CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospitals Unions (OCHU-CUPE) say this research offers "important lessons" for Ontario, where the provincial government has been expanding privatization of cataract, hips and knee surgeries through private clinics.

By 2024, the reports say 59 per cent of cataract surgeries were being delivered privately in England, up from 15 per cent in 2019. The report also says this expansion came at a "steep cost" to the public purse as expenditures have increased. Between 2018-19 and 2022-23, the number of cataract surgeries across England increased by 25 per cent while annual expenditure went up by 95 per cent.

“The private sector takes away precious resources from the public system,” Pollock said in a release. “In addition to the significant amount of money diverted to private owners, public hospitals lose doctors and other staff who are required to manage and monitor more complicated eye care.”

It’s estimated that 60,000 patients have been displaced from surgical wait lists to make way for patients who had their original treatment in private facilities, the reports indicate.

“The private sector cherry-picks healthier patients, discharges them early and then washes its hands of patients, so that the management of re-admissions including complications following surgery goes back to the public system,” Pollock said. “Meanwhile, the poorer and sicker patients suffer longer wait times in England.

"In Scotland, where privatization is minimal, access to care is based on need instead of affluence," she added.

While wait times have been shorter for patients going to the private sector, for every one per cent of patient growth in publicly funded private sector treatments, the overall wait times for all patients rise by two per cent in England, the reports say.

"Ontario must learn from the perilous path of privatization followed in England and abandon its privatization of surgical care," OCHU-CUPE says in the release.

Between 2017 and 2022, they say about 19 per cent of cataract surgeries in Ontario were delivered by private clinics. The provincial government is also providing $125 million over two years to private clinics for 20,000 hip and knee surgeries, while another $155 million is being moved to the private sector for diagnostic tests.

“Like in England, Ontario is paying a higher price for cataract surgeries in private clinics. Like England, we are seeing increasing inequities in access to care," said Natalie Mehra, OHC's executive director.

OHC says it has been investigating private clinics across the province for "unethical practices," as the organization has received complaints from patients about upselling and extra-billing. It claims some private clinics in the Barrie area, when contacted by OHC, provided misleading and unethical information.

"For instance, one private clinic said that patients could get faster access to cataract surgeries by paying out-of-pocket," states the release. "They suggested this would help avoid the 'OHIP route,' which would entail wait times of six months or more."

Mehra says wait times at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie are about 4.5 months (139 days) for the lowest priority patients.

“We are calling on the Ford government to stop the private clinics and put that funding into the public hospitals that behave ethically and provide high-quality cataract surgery in accordance with the patient protections in our public medicare laws,” she added.

Link to original article: https://www.barrietoday.com/local-news/ontario-warned-against-following-englands-path-on-surgical-privatization-11501095

The OHC notes that as funding is diverted from Ontario’s public hospitals to private clinics (predominantly for-profit), the most affluent people benefit at the expense of the majority of people.

According to Hurley, there’s also an evident divide in access to care since virtually all private clinics in Ontario are located in the wealthiest neighbourhoods of large urban centres where there is a sizable market of wealthier people who can afford to pay extra user fees.

That means rural areas and small towns like Midland don’t typically have private clinics, he notes.

Hurley also points to a study published last year by the Canadian Medical Association, which determined that privatization of cataract surgeries in Ontario correlated with increasing inequity in access to care.

According to the CMA report, the most affluent people increased access to care by 22 per cent while the most marginalized suffered a nine per cent decrease in surgical rates.

Hurley says that it’s essential for Ontario “to course-correct as soon as possible before the system is deeply fractured like in England” where restoring capacity and reducing inequalities would be expensive due to the extent of privatization.

Link to original article: https://www.villagereport.ca/village-picks/crisis-coming-prof-hopes-province-learns-from-englands-privatization-miscues-11544680

(November 27, 2025)

By: Iris Gorfinkel, Toronto Star

Ontarians need to be on high alert. Alberta has taken a major step toward privatizing health care. Bill 55 will allow surgeons to work in both public hospitals and private‑pay clinics. Under this dual-practice model, cataract surgeries and joint replacements done during business hours would be covered by the province, while the same procedures in evenings or on weekends could be sold to patients for out-of-pocket fees.

Alberta would also let investor‑run corporations operate public hospitals — turning them into profit centres and throwing the doors open to a two‑tier system. It’s framed as “choice, efficiency and innovation,” but it effectively turns patient wait-lists into a customer list, targeting those who can pay with shorter waits.

This sets a concerning precedent. Ontario doesn’t have a Bill 55 by name, but a version of this is already taking shape through expanding for‑profit clinics and extra fees. We’re promised “you’ll show your OHIP card, not your credit card” — there’s nothing to fear. But Ontario’s reality shows how quickly a publicly funded procedure can turn into a profit-generating business once regulation allows it.

Privately run centres in Ontario perform cataract operations, orthopedic surgeries and imaging, such as MRIs and CT scans. These are funded through the provincial plan, but independent investigations have documented patients being charged thousands of dollars in extra fees for services that should have been covered.

The Ontario Health Coalition’s report, “Under the Skin” details clinics billing seniors for premium lenses, administrative fees and mandatory “consultation packages.” Many vulnerable patients didn’t realize those fees were illegal or that the basic surgery was already covered by OHIP under both the Canada Health Act and Ontario law.

Proponents argue that for‑profit centres are harmless because core services on offer remain publicly funded. But the dividing line between “public” and “private” quickly blurs when providers make more income from those who pay. In practice, this means promoting upgrades, upselling services and steering patients toward paid options, whether or not they’re medically needed.

Ontarians who can afford it buy their way to faster care, while patients living paycheque to paycheque are left with even longer wait times as the public system is drained of staff by higher-paid private work. This is gradually shifting Ontario away from universal, equitable care toward a system where health justice hinges on income.

International experience with privatization sends a stark warning. A recent comparison of 25 wealthy countries by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that countries that rely more heavily on private health care tend to suffer more preventable illnesses and die sooner. Maternal and infant mortality rates also rise when countries are more reliant on for-profit health systems.

In contrast, countries with strong public systems — like Sweden, Norway and Denmark — live longer, have fewer preventable diseases, and suffer less maternal and infant deaths. The global record is blunt: When countries choose more privatization, they choose shorter, sicker lives.

Canada’s Health Act stands at a fork in the road. One path diverts resources to for‑profit clinics, normalizes extra fees and enables investor‑run facilities to put revenue over the public’s health.

The other path invests in health care workers, expands public operating rooms, funds team-based care and rewards family doctors offering comprehensive primary care.

The second path is worth defending, and it demands enforcing existing laws against extra-billing and consequences for clinics that break them.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said, “Health care shouldn’t be about blind and outdated ideologies or politics.”

Let’s hope she wasn’t referring to universal public health care. What happens in Alberta doesn’t stay in Alberta. Every dollar “invested” into for‑profit clinics drains the public system. When profits are prioritized over health, it results in more preventable illnesses and shorter lives.

Alberta sets a dangerous precedent for Ontario, tying timely care to a person’s bank balance and ignoring a fundamental truth: Privatization leaves the sickest and poorest behind, while those who can pay leapfrog to the front of the line.

Link to original article: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/alberta-is-turning-public-hospitals-into-private-businesses-will-ontario-follow/article_ab5e58c3-af4a-4879-a92f-d63c4a2bbded.html

(November 28, 2025)

By: Jason Setnyk, Seaway News

Privatization of hospital surgeries in England has been “catastrophic” and should warn Ontario, Prof. Allyson Pollock told reporters at the Cornwall Public Library on Friday.

Pollock, professor emerita at Newcastle University, joined Ontario Health Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra and OCHU-CUPE president Michael Hurley to release new research on two decades of privatized cataract, hip, and knee surgeries in England and Scotland. England, she said, used public funds to contract procedures to for-profit clinics, weakening public hospitals. “Our studies show that diverting money from public hospitals to private clinics has destabilized services and training and shifted staff away from public hospitals,” Pollock said. While wait times initially fell for patients able to access private clinics, she said inequalities grew as poorer and sicker patients waited longer for care in England, unlike in Scotland, which kept surgeries in the public system.

By 2024, 59 per cent of cataract surgeries and 60 per cent of hip and knee replacements in England were done in for-profit facilities. Five companies were estimated to have taken £90 million in a single year from publicly funded cataract operations.

The coalition says the research offers lessons for Ontario, where the government is expanding the use of private clinics for cataract, hip and knee surgeries and diagnostic tests. Between 2017 and 2022, about 19 per cent of cataract surgeries in Ontario were already performed in private clinics.

Pollock called for “a complete moratorium on all privatization of elective surgery” and for existing contracts to be reviewed and brought back into public hospitals. The Ontario Health Coalition also used the Cornwall news conference to highlight access to surgeries locally, including what it describes as unethical practices at a for-profit clinic in the city that offered “queue-jumping” and urged the province to reinvest in public hospitals instead of “cannibalizing” them.

Link to original article: https://www.cornwallseawaynews.com/local/advocates-urge-halt-to-surgery-privatization/

"In fact, 41 percent of working-age Americans—or 72 million people—have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt, up from 34 percent in 2005. If you add in the 7 million elderly adults who are also dealing with these issues, a total of 79 million Americans have medical bill or debt problems."

Population of Canada in 2025 ~ 40.2 - 41.7 million.

Links: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/survey-79-million-americans-have-problems-medical-bills-or-debt

Canadians’ medical debt largely driven by dental bills, prescription medications Healthcare related expenses pushed almost 18% of Canadians into debt. The poll, covering Canada, the U.S. and Australia, found Canadians faced the second highest amount of healthcare-related debt after the U.S. In total, 17.5% of Canadians are in debt because of healthcare costs. Dental checkups and prescription medications were the most likely sources of healthcare debt.

What ongoing healthcare costs do people pay for? In Canada, dental check-ups was in number one followed by prescription medications, then “none of the above”, followed by gym memberships.

Links: https://nbhc.ca/health-in-the-news/canadians-medical-debt-largely-driven-dental-bills-prescription-medications

https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/health-insurance/features/how-much-do-we-value-our-health/

Updated Nov 20, 2025 7:44 am.

"Among the findings was a lack of due diligence in the transfer of services, poor risk assessment by AHS, and the decision to proceed despite knowing the main objective of saving money was unlikely to be achieved.

The report points to then-health minister Adriana LaGrange as having pressed for the move, with her department accused of undermining AHS in the process.

In the spring of 2022, the Alberta government signed a 15-year contract with DynaLife to fully privatize lab testing services in the province. Less than a year after the transition, the province bought out DynaLife in a multi-million dollar deal that returned the lab contract to Alberta Precision Labs (APL), which is part of AHS."

https://calgary.citynews.ca/2025/11/19/alberta-dynalife-report/

(November 14, 2025)

By: Global News

The Ontario Health Coalition and CUPE are concerned about the potential consequences or privatizing surgeries in Ontario. According to research from Allyson Pollock, a professor at Newcastle University, an increase in contracting out cataract, hip and knee surgeries to for-profit facilities in England led to increased inequalities, reduced capacity and longer wait times at public hospitals. Those findings were presented during a press conference at the Peterborough Public Library on Thursday morning. CUPE and the Ontario Health Coalition say the province can learn from this research and apply the lessons to its own healthcare system.

Link to video coverage: https://globalnews.ca/video/11526752/ontario-health-coalition-cupe-warn-ontario-of-consequences-of-privatizing-surgeries

(November 11, 2025)

By: CBC News National

New research suggest privatizing surgeries can lead to longer wait times. Christine Birak has the findings.

Link to video coverage: https://youtu.be/CxLxR2fbsn0?t=1457

(November 3, 2025)

By: Joanna Frketich, The Hamilton Spectator (behind a paywall)

–> Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, is quoted within:

Three patients were included in internal reviews of tonsil surgery at McMaster Children’s Hospital, documents released during the freedom of information process show for the first time.

The reviews were triggered by the deaths of two children after tonsillectomy surgeries in May and June 2024.

The public has a right to know what happened to the third patient, said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, which advocates to protect and improve the health-care system.

“It is shocking to me that the hospital does not feel that it should be accountable to the public,” Mehra said. “Why are there three patients in the internal review? There is a compelling public interest to know this, and one would think it would be in the hospital’s interest to be transparent and open, at the very least, to ensure that the public can have confidence in their services.”

“They have a lot to answer for here,” Mehra said. “These are literally life and death issues for the families who bring their children to the hospital.”

“The bottom line is that quality of care information is vital for the public to know,” Mehra said. “For people to have confidence in their local hospitals is critical. Hiding information does not instil confidence.”

In addition, Mehra emphasizes hospitals are public services, funded by taxpayers and accountable to their communities. She questions how many health dollars have been spent fighting to keep secret the reviews into tonsil surgery at McMaster.

“All of the money that they are spending is public money,” Mehra said. “That should go to improving patient care and not to hiding information from the public.”

Link to full, original paywalled article: https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/they-have-a-lot-to-answer-for-hhs-refuses-to-explain-third-patient-in-tonsil/article_a953949f-b3fb-55b9-bfae-6e421cfb4461.html

By: Ontario Today with Amanda Pfeffer

Ontario Health Coalition Executive Director Natalie Mehra and Dr. Danyaal Raza were on CBC Radio’s Ontario Today’s provincial open-line program to discuss the expansion of private health care and to answer the question "The cost of private health care: How much did you pay?"

Link to radio interview: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16184063-how-much-paid-private-health-care

More Canadians say they have a family doctor or nurse practitioner now than three years ago, according to a major national survey that suggests the country is beginning to turn the corner on the primary-care crisis.

The new results, released Monday, show an estimated 5.9 million Canadians don’t have a primary-care physician or nurse practitioner, an improvement from 2022, when about 6.5 million lacked a regular provider.

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More than half of Ontario doctors are planning to retire or considering that option in the next five years, according to a new survey that underscores the challenges for the health system as baby boomer physicians approach the end of their working lives.

The Ontario Medical Association released the results of an online survey of physicians on Wednesday that found 51 per cent of specialists and 52 per cent of primary care doctors identified themselves as approaching retirement age and either thinking of or planning to hang up their stethoscopes within five years.

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Ontario’s Auditor-General says the province isn’t auditing doctors whose billings raise obvious red flags, including 82 doctors who claimed to have worked 24 hours or more in a single day, a diagnostic radiologist who billed for an average of 461 patients daily and an ophthalmologist who billed $6.7-million in one year, more than twice as much as the next highest biller in the specialty.

The same unnamed ophthalmologist has been investigated three times for allegedly charging patients out-of-pocket fees for services that should be free through the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

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More cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed at Stage 4 in recent years compared with about a decade earlier, a development that experts behind a new study suggest could be linked with official recommendations discouraging the use of a hotly debated screening test.

The prostate-specific antigen test is a simple blood test that can serve as an early warning signal of cancer in men with no symptoms. But the test also has risks: It can lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment of slow-growing prostate tumours that might never have caused harm had they remained undiscovered.

For that reason, a national task force in the United States recommended against screening with the PSA test in 2012. Two years later, a Canadian task force, which had never endorsed the test for screening, followed suit.

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You can find the document with the recommendations here: https://www.accessbc.org/_files/ugd/9fd619_d886fad898444a609c6fa08a824c36ec.pdf

Listen to this episode by clicking above or subscribe to The Decibel on your favourite podcast app or platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts and YouTube.

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Cancer mortality rates continue to fall in Canada, driven by decreases in the death rates from lung and colorectal cancer, but progress has stalled against one type of cancer that is entirely preventable.

Cervical cancer rates have plateaued, according to a major report on cancer trends published every two years by Statistics Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Cancer Society.

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Measles, a virus considered to have been eliminated in Canada in 1998, has made a comeback in this country.

On Monday, the Pan American Health Organization, a regional arm of the World Health Organization, declared that Canada has lost its measles elimination status after failing to interrupt transmission within one year of an outbreak.

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When Laura Crane was diagnosed with Stage 3 melanoma a decade ago, searching for the right clinical trial felt like “enrolling in a heavy university course” at the worst possible moment.

The Thunder Bay teacher, now 47, burrowed down Google rabbit holes about skin-cancer research, trying to understand her options. She turned to her aunt, a physician in New Mexico, for guidance, and asked other doctors, friends and acquaintances what they knew about getting spots in trials.

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