By William Hogg, MD
Most people in Niagara see the Niagara Health System as an ogre.
Health care delivery here is bad. The lay-administrators of Niagara Health System (NHS), who should be focused on balancing finances properly, have stuck their noses into medical matters and thoroughly botched them.
Emergency department closures in the southern tier of Niagara are just part of the fiasco. But they are enough to gain the bureaucrats a new and sinister slogan to play with: NHS = DOA!!!
Not a happy thought. And so recently borne out by the untimely death of an exceptionally promising young girl, Reilly Anzovino.
The disruptive moving or curtailing of other basic services should not be ignored. These essential medical services – obstetrics, pediatrics, surgery, intensive care and psychiatry, to cite just five – have also been thrown into disarray through totally inept moves by NHS. The general medical and nursing picture is a common, everyday experience of those of us who become patients in Niagara.
As a case in point, I just recently had to go over to Port Colborne from Fort Erie to drive my daughter – through a snowstorm – to Niagara Falls to have her new baby. No Port or Fort person can ever be born in his or her own hometown again. NHS has hijacked our children’s and grandchildren’s very birthright.
What is not well known is what driving force is behind it all – all this medical mess. No, not simply NHS and its LHIN pseudo-bosses. Nor is it all the Liberal government, Premier McGuinty, and his Health Ministry.
No, it is something else altogether: the PRIVATE PARTNERS. What? Who? Never heard of them? Let me be very specific. Three big Canadian banks – the Royal Bank of Canada, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and the Bank of Montreal – are working right along with NHS to turn our fine Medicare into something akin to US-America’s dysfunctional way of doing it. They are the silent and pervasive force right in our midst. Yes, the same corner banks we all defer to every day.
These three Canadian banks (along with other big-money ‘P3’ Private Partners) are silently financing the billion dollar (plus), poorly placed monster-hospital now a-building way off in the boondocks on the remote side of St. Catharines. Far away from most of Niagara. Yes, that’s the same white elephant NHS is so gleefully partying about, the ridiculous infrastructure project that is sucking every other hospital in Niagara dry. Its existence is a prelude to the ruination of local health care and ultimately a template for turning our Canadian Medicare system into a disguised Health Maintenance Organization, an HMO American style. Privatized Medicare – what a stupid compound term!
Now that I’ve wetted your appetite, let me go back a bit in time.
Early last spring (2009), as Mrs. Sue Salzer and her wonderful Yellow Shirt Brigade were taking runs of protest against NHS’s bureaucrats and Queens Park politicians, I decided to do an end run and zero in on the BIG money manipulators.
I soon found out that British Columbia and other points west had been through all of what we are going through several years ago – and now rue it. (And, by the way, some places are now trying to reverse it.)
Anyway, our ‘financially-challenged’ provincial government, before setting up its non-representative buffer layer of LHINs, decided to partner with big money sources from all over the world. It decided to sell its (our?) soul to the company store as it were. It courted the help of the enemies of ‘free’ shared public service!
At one touchy point, the Niagara part of this secret and nefarious plan almost faltered: Germany’s own Deutsch bank temporarily withdrew from the scheme. Does that kindle a glimmer of memory? It hit the papers. But (sleazy?) back room talks got things back on track and Germany again has its latter-day stake in Niagara.
Efforts like Niagara’s mess now are afoot all across rural and small town Ontario. But I wander far afield. What about my personal ‘run’ at Niagara’s honey-pots? Well, I soon learned what we all now should know, that the monster-hospital, now a-building in the far off boondocks is not a gift.
It will be sucking every other facility in the region dry for 30 years. And the big-money ‘benefactors’ will be lining their pockets at taxpayers’ expense all the while. Next, I set out to find out who these ‘wonderful’ Private Partners are. In Niagara.
Here they are in a bleak list. Please imprint it on your memory:
[coordinators]
|
Plenary Group
Borealis Infrastructure
[insurance companies]
|
Sun Life Financial
Great-West Life Assurance Company
Industrial Alliance
BIMCOR
(This last outfit has no recorded CEO head; it
may manage teacher’s pension funds in trust.)
[banks]
|
Deutsche Bank
TD Securities Inc.
RBC Capital Markets
BMO Capital Markets
Next, I decided to write to each of them, their CEOs, to warn them about how improperly their money was being spent and warn them of the potentially lethal consequences to ordinary people.
I wanted to give them a chance to do something to remedy the disastrous situation then a-brewing under their aegis. I must admit that I wasn’t exactly diplomatic, for I thought that such smart business people should know better. All big companies nowadays check out the environmental impact of their various ventures beforehand, don’t they – why not the human impact?
Well, they don’t!
Below is an exact copy of the letter I sent to our own Royal Bank’s investment branch. Every P3 Partner got an almost exact replica:
Doug McGregor, Chairman and Co-CEO June 2, 2009
RBC Capital Markets, Royal Bank Plaza, 200 Bay Street
Toronto ON Canada M5J 2W7
Dear Mr. McGregor:
Along with other like-minded people of the Niagara Region, I applaud your financial involvement with government in the new hospital now being built at St. Catharines. It should be a boon to all.
But apparently it isn’t—as it now goes.
The Niagara Health System, in its currently fashionable centralizing trend, is in a steamrolling process of rendering its southern tier of towns, villages and rural areas a medical wasteland. As described in my “Horror Story” [http://knol.google.com/k/a-small-town-horror-story#], one small, but fiscally sound hospital, very critical to the border area adjacent to Buffalo NY, the Douglas Memorial in Fort Erie, has been effectively stolen from its rightful citizen owners and its services systematically torn apart piece by piece.
The gravely ill, old and young alike, are soon to be forced to make their way, some 40-50 miles, to the new site that your company in its good name is fostering. There will be deaths en route. Some people with acute head injuries or bad heart attacks, etc., will just not survive the trip.
My friends and I are sure you do not really want such. Nor would you, I believe, appreciate your good corporate name associated with preventable deaths.
I ask you to look into this terrible mistake. That’s all at this point.
Please feel free to write or to phone me at ___ ___ ____.
Yours truly, William Hogg, MD
(William Hogg is a retired physician living in Fort Erie and a former teacher at McMaster University’s medical school.)
(Take a moment to click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest and concern to residents in our binational Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 
I have felt all along that big money was behind all of this stupidity. Ethics have gone out the window long ago and words such as altruism and empathy deleted from the dictionary as they have been in the US with their “if you’re rich you survive, poor you can die” HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. How they would love to open a new market of 33 million people to screw out of their hard earned cash. Health care IS a right and NOT a privelege of the rich. A healthy population is a productive one. In the US, due to health concerns, uninsured people are losing their homes. Health care costs are running rampant in the US and still millions are uninsured. Most inurance billings have gone up 30% in the last year alone and you can be terminated if you get too expensive for the company to bear or they will boot you out for imaginary “pre-existing” conditions. Why do you think you always see fundraisers on US TV for some poor sucker unfortunate enough to be born with congenital problems or even for someone who develops cancer and cannot afford treatment? Do you really want that in Canada? How can privatization be an improvement here? The only people who benefit from this treachery are the corporations. Everything is about money! It is no longer government by the people for the people but rather government by the corporations for the corporations. Sadly, our “leaders” in the NHS also lacked the ethics to buck the system – certainly some could have resigned in protest over changes being forced upon them from above or at least spoken out publicly against them. Politicians could have stood up to big finance but – no – lose their big pay cheques? God forbid. They have probably already bought shares in the private companies – inside info of course. Money wins every time. We are 33 million plus strong and must demand our right to universal health care. We pathetic, passive Canadians won’t cherish what we have until it’s gone! Tommy Douglas is spinning in his grave!
LikeLike
For another example of the private sector at work behind the scenes, read Saturday’s Globe and Mail Focus and Books section ,” Road to the Budget, The Trouble With Health Care”, Karen Howlett, where it notes the use of ‘fill-in’ Doctors from AIM Health” ( a private, quite costly, company, charging ” $500 for providing someone on less than 24 hours notice” etc.) was formalized by an “agreement with Niagara Health on April 1st 2008.”
LikeLike
There is a very simple answer that was used at the beginning of the Universal Health Care in Canada. It is still available to-day but the political parties (ALL) have sold their souls to big biz and banks. Care for the solution? Glenn
LikeLike
Many thanks to William Hogg for his “After Work Research” (The real value of retirement!). He has put fact and numbers to something many of us knew was happening.
In February 2008 I wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Review questioning the contradictions contained in two articles. I paste the letter below (Please note I am also chair of the Canadian-Cuban Friendship Association of Niagara):
Two articles in Thursday’s Review caught my interest because of the irony of their conflicting messages: MPP, Kim Craitor, attempts to explain we need “P3 Partnerships” because the Province does not have the $8 billion necessary to renovate NHS existing buildings, build the new hospital and cover operating costs.
We know the value of, our often over crowded, public healthcare both from a cost point of view and results: Last month we learned Canada is tied with Cuba for the lowest infant mortality rate in all the Americas. And Canadians live, on average, two years longer than Americans.
One wonders where the “Private Partner” would raise the capital and how that partner would recover the investment, plus the necessary “4th. P.”, Profit? Since government always has a better credit rating than any private corporation, hence lower interest rates, how can this be better than borrowing the money and building as a wholly-owned public asset….in a word, hold our own mortgage?
This debate seems ludicrous in one of the worlds richest countries.
On the back page: “Hope builds for reform in Cuba” the Associated Press article speculates on how capitalist reforms would raise wages (for some, assumed) and allow people to buy cell phones and cars.
Today any Cuban will tell you; they can not make ends meet on $20 per month. But they don’t have P3 partners to build and renovate schools and hospitals; All Cuban children have the opportunity for a university education….without a student loan! Cuba provides full scholarships to thousands of poor foreign students; 30,000 of Cuba’s 70,000 doctors are working overseas in poor countries; Cuba has a lower HIV/AIDS infection rate than, even, Canada.
What other country in the world, if willing, has the human resources to do what Cuba is doing? The Cuban example should be watched by those who do want to “Reform”, not “Reformed”.
LikeLike
Privatization of health care is a real concern too. I heard that the majority of beds in the new hospital will be private rooms … does this mean that patients will have to pay to stay in them? Most of us don’t have the money for that, so what gives with that?
LikeLike