Re: Hospital seeks to avoid cuts - April 9, 2008

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To the editor of the Sudbury Star,
(Published April 15, 2008)

George Smitherman says hospitals facing cash shortfalls shouldn't expect more from the province, even if it means laying off nurses and closing beds. Otherwise, he said, there would be a "free-for-all where hospitals spend whatever they want and send in the bill at the end of the year, and that the people's heath-care system can't be sustained on that basis".

In my vision of "the people's health-care system", the hospitals would spend whatever was required to meet the health care demands of their community and send in the bills as the year went along. I understand the need to be vigilant about frivolous spending and poor hospital management, but to fund these institutions without any consideration of the of level of legitimate services required is surreal.

Smitherman's strategy of closing beds and reducing service levels to forestall deficits doesn't punish the hospital management. It punishes the taxpayers of this province, ordinary citizens who need the care that the provincial government, in the person of George Smitherman, would so glibly deny them.