Brant News photo
Brant MPP Dave Levac
Dave Levac
FOR BRANT NEWS
As your member of provincial parliament, it is incumbent upon me to keep you updated on the issues being discussed and debated at Queen’s Park.
Recently, the Ontario government has launched a health care proposal to transform the health care system by dealing with demographic challenges, as well as the province’s deficit.
The Action Plan for Health Care in Ontario calls for “families and individuals (to) get the best health care where and when they need it, while ensuring all Ontarians get better value for their health dollars.”
The plan, laid out last week, seeks to:
• Make necessary and responsible decisions regarding funding priorities and ensure funding is shifted to where we get the best value.
• Provide new measures to prevent illness and help Ontarians stay healthy.
• Give Ontarians better access to family doctors and nurse practitioners – through after-hours care and same-day and next-day appointments – that will save Ontarians time, keep them healthier and help them avoid trips to hospital.
• Support Ontario’s seniors who want to live independently at home, in their communities, by providing more home care supports.
To achieve these goals, the government has stated it plans “to bring planning for family health care under Ontario’s Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs), ensuring that patients will have a more seamless experience in the local health care system, from their family doctor to hospitals and improving the quality of care that seniors receive at home.”
In addition, the government seeks “to move more routine procedures into specialized not-for-profit clinics in instances where it’s clear that these clinics can provide patients with safe, high-quality care at better value.”
According to government statistics, the number of seniors in Ontario will increase by 43 per cent during the next decade. At current spending levels, the senior population is projected to cost Ontario $24 billion more annually by 2030. That’s 50 per cent more than today.
In 2010-2011, more than 271,000 emergency room visits were made to Ontario hospitals that could have been treated in alternative primary care settings. In 2009, there were 140,000 unplanned instances of patients re-admitted to hospital within a month of their original discharge.
As the government moves forward with its action plan, you need to be fully aware of what’s taking place. To ensure your concerns and issues are heard and conveyed, I encourage you to contact me at 519-759-0361.
You can also visit my website at www.davelevac.on.ca for up-to-date information.
Dave Levac is MPP for Brant and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
—An extra layer of bureuacrats seldom works at the sharp end of the stick. The LHINs used to be just an excuse for closing hospitals like St. Joseph’s. Now it looks like they need a new excuse to pay these expensive civil servants called “family health care”. I see words that don’t convey meaning. I see taxes spent frivolously. I am reminded of the “billion dollar boondoggle”, E-Health. I smell cronyism at work, just like Ornge. It is all about overpaid purposeless employment for friends of the party. We got along fine without LHINs before. The money is better spent on patients.
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“According to government statistics, the number of seniors in Ontario will increase by 43 per cent during the next decade. At current spending levels, the senior population is projected to cost Ontario $24 billion more annually by 2030. That’s 50 per cent more than today.”
This is an extremely misleading statement. Of course, as there are more seniors the cost of this group will go up but as they leave the under 65 group the cost for that group will go down. It’s the same number of people just shifting from one artificially identified group to another. And the amount of taxes paid by seniors will rise greatly as well. Don’t make it seem like the problem is due to seniors.
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Government control of health care is by far the number one cause of its bureaucratization and centralized ineptitude. And the remedy is… all together now, [b]more government[/b].
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I think LIHNs came after St. Joseph’s was closed in Brantford.
Nevertheless, I think they are just a another layer of expensive bureaucracy that costs more money.
Is there any proof they have actually improved health-care delivery or that any improvements are a result of LIHNs?
I agree with Stephen Morris. Get rid of LIHNs and put those millions into front line health-care.
And, at one time, the federal government and the province used to pay 50/50 toward health-care, what happened to that agreement?
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