Protect public health care now on slippery slope

Dear editor,
In 2022 my wife and I lost access to our family doctor. We now have to go to the emergency clinic in our local hospital.

In addition we have now been told that many surgical procedures would be done in a private clinic, but our OHIP card would pay for this, although what OHIP pays would likely cost more than if procedures were done in a provincially funded hospital.

This means we will pay more for health care!

In addition, because privately administered clinics/hospitals would have a baseline clientele they would also be able to offer their services to the highest bidder.

So now, public funds would prop up private health care, meaning less funding for public health care. This is a slippery slope which eventually would bring us back to the situation Canada had prior to universal health care.

This is not the what Canadians in general need. We need the government of Ontario to invest in training public health care professionals and infrastructure and plan these intervention as strategic actions because training and building our health care system has a long lead time.
We need investment, not band-aid actions.

Eric de Pauw