Updates

To help address the substantial surgical backlog, governments across Canada (for example, Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan, Quebec) are increasing public financing for private, for-profit health facilities (Alberta, 2022; Ontario, 2022; Saskatchewan, 2022; The Canadian Press, 2022). Most hospitals in Canada are owned by regional health authorities (public ownership model, mostly outside of Ontario) or are not-for-profit entities (mostly in Ontario). Outside hospitals, there are some private for-profit facilities that are primarily funded by governments to provide routine diagnostics and low-complexity, high-volume outpatient surgical care. For-profit health care has been a contentious subject for decades (Doolittle, 2022), in part due to concerns about the conflict between the profit motive, quality of care and workforce objectives. Concerns also relate to pre-pandemic reports of extra-billing (which is illegal in most provinces for medically necessary services), and queue jumping for wealthy patients (Longhurst, 2022), and the potential to exacerbate brain drain when health care worker shortages are a major issue following the pandemic (Tait, 2022; Vescera, 2022).