Hampton pledge to pay for delisted health services

The Liberals campaign against Conservative policies and then implement them when elected. The P3 partnerships are just another way to make hospitals a profit center. The two big parties depend upon big capital and so whichever you pick Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum they win. There may be come variations and perhaps the Liberals are marginally better on health care policy but it is so marginal as hardly to matter much. Governments are determined to offload medical costs and open everything possible in the health field to profit. The NDP might do somewhat better, at least their policies point in a more progressive direction but then they are not going to form a majority government--I don't think so anyway IMHO!


Hampton pledges to pay for delisted health services

Attacks Liberal embrace of privatization, promises to cut health tax for low- and mid-income earners

Sep 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Robert Benzie
Queen's Park Bureau Chief

ELLIOT LAKE, Ont.–Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty's "broken promises" have fuelled the creeping privatization of Ontario's health-care system, NDP Leader Howard Hampton charges.

Yesterday, Hampton said McGuinty's embrace of private-public partnership (P3) hospitals and his delisting of chiropractic, physiotherapy and optometry services were salt on the wounds of Ontarians struggling to pay the health tax.

"I want you to know that New Democrats are going to put these services back into the public health-care system," he told cheering seniors here. "The delisting of these services is a form of privatization. It forces patients to pay out of their own pocket for much-needed health-care services that help prevent further illness and help to manage chronic disease."

What is most galling, Hampton said, is that McGuinty promised during the 2003 election that a Liberal government would strengthen medicare, oppose U.S.-style private-public partnerships for hospitals and not raise taxes.

There are now 10 so-called P3 hospitals under construction and 29 more have been announced. McGuinty's government says P3 facilities are needed to fix and replace Ontario's $100 billion infrastructure deficit of crumbling hospitals, schools and courthouses, and antiquated water pipes.

However, the Liberals refuse to use that term, instead dubbing them "alternative finance procurement" projects because they aggressively campaigned against Progressive Conservative P3s in 2003.

"His flirtation with privatization, private home care and now profit-driven private-operation hospitals has meant that a lot of money that should be going to patient care is instead going to corporate profits and that is wrong," said Hampton.

The Liberals delisted the services the same day they introduced the annual health tax of up to $900.

An NDP government – or, Hampton has suggested, a minority Liberal or Tory administration propped up by the New Democrats – would cut the tax for lower- and middle-income earners.

That would mean a health-tax rebate of up to $450 a person, said Hampton, who illustrated his point in Sault Ste. Marie by posing with three large galvanized steel buckets filled with 45,000 pennies. He was flanked by a video from the 2003 leaders' debate with McGuinty saying how "we will not raise taxes one cent on Ontario families."