Health Care Funding

To the editor of the Sudbury Star

I read the article in the January 24th edition describing how Dr. Brian Day, incoming head of the CMA, called for funding hospitals based on the number of patients they treat instead of the current "global funding model". This just shows how woefully ignorant some of us are about how the system works. I thought that, just as OHIP pays doctors for the specific services they provide me, they also paid the hospitals on the same basis. In an attempt to educate myself, I wandered through the Ministry Of Health and Long Term Care website and found no clear cut description of how the current funding works.

The present system Dr. Day describes, blocks of dollars being doled out to hospitals based on some obscure Ministry criteria, looks to me like a root cause of our current problems. It does not take into account the quantity or types of services that hospitals provide, especially if the volume is changing. When money runs out, services must be reduced in some way to avoid the dreaded deficit. This appears to reduce any incentive for the hospital to actually treat more people, or the same number of people in a more timely manner, since their revenue side is fixed. The only help now is for Big Brother in Toronto to grudgingly provide more money. OUR MONEY!!!! And this appears to be a battle every time.

Payment to the hospitals by OHIP at a fixed fee schedule for specific services provided would seem to encourage them to provide the required care since their revenues would bear some relationship to their actual expenditures. The quality of service could be maintained as well, since we know that qualitative reductions in care and ancillary functions occur as the current budgets get stressed. Relative efficiencies of the various hospitals could also be compared because they would each get the same amount of money for the same procedures.

I believe that Dr. Day is onto something here and his proposal could change the whole way things are done for the better. Imagine the Province paying for the hospital care that is required instead of trying to jam our needs into the much smaller box of whatever lump sums they are willing to commit. I'll even bet that, if the government had to pay hospital rates for Long Term Care patients, they might see that funding enough long term care facilities would be more cost effective too.

Now if only all of us could get as irate about this as we did about the Mayor and the Francophone flag.....