Quebec private healthcare cost more than $6B in 2023-2024: CSN

The amount allocated to private healthcare exceeded $6 billion in 2023-2024, calculated by the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) based on the institutions’ publicly available financial reports.

This amount was calculated by adding the cost of independent labor and purchased services in each CISSS and CIUSSS. Purchased services can include a fairly wide range, including maintenance contracts, cafeteria services, but also the use of occupational therapists, psychologists, and nutritionists, among others.

The CSN’s research department also noted that the government would have saved more than $700 million if it had used employees from the public health and social services network.

“For us, these figures demonstrate that it’s not true that private healthcare costs less and is more efficient. “That’s false,” said CSN Vice-President David Bergeron-Cyr.

The CSN is trying to ensure its message resonates with the Legault government. The union wants an end to the expansion of private healthcare.

“What we’ve seen for 30 years is the failure of the neoliberal and capitalist policies of our various governments, of our public health and social services network. These policies represent privatization, centralization, systematic underfunding, and they destroy the network,” said Bergeron-Cyr.

He also points out that access to care is not improving and that the number of people waiting on waiting lists is still very high. He acknowledges that the COVID-19 pandemic has not helped the situation, but he believes that problems accessing health care and services were already present beforehand.

Paying with the Sun Card is a bad idea, according to the CSN

Health Minister Christian Dubé has already announced that he wants to divest from private agencies. Most recently, hospitals in urban centers stopped using employment agencies, and other regions are expected to do the same in the coming months.

With this measure, Dubé hoped to repatriate private sector staff to the public network. He states that over the past year, 5,100 employees have returned to work in the public network.

The pool of healthcare professionals is the same in the private and public sectors, and working conditions are often more attractive in the private sector, particularly because private clinics are rarely open in the evenings or on weekends. “The private sector in healthcare isn’t complementary; it’s a competitor,” said Bergeron-Cyr.

The initiative to gradually divest from private agencies is a step in the right direction, admits Bergeron-Cyr, but according to him, the minister has no other choice since the use of these professionals had become uncontrollable and very costly. “Independent labor, when it started, was supposed to meet a one-off need in a few regions. Ultimately, it became the panacea. It exploded,” he said.

Minister Dubé wants to use the private sector to support the public system, which is unable to meet the population’s needs, for example, with surgical waiting lists that have grown in recent years.

Dubé often talks about offering private care that the population could pay for with their health insurance card. Bergeron-Cyr is outraged by this strategy.

“It’s the government’s desire to offer private health services, but reimbursed by the state. What we’re saying is that everyone will pay twice. […] When you do private-public work like this, you pay twice because we pay with our taxes, and on top of that, [private institutions] will make a profit. It’s not true that they will offer the same service at the same cost. That means it will cost the government more to do business with these people, and that means we’ll pay a second time for their profit,” he denounced.

He reiterated the requests that the CSN has often made to the Minister of Health. It hopes that by May 1, he will curb the exodus of doctors to the private sector, going further than Bill 83, which notably plans to prevent doctors from moving back and forth between the private and public sectors and to require new doctors to practice for five years in Quebec’s public network.

The CSN also calls on the government to immediately stop licensing private for-profit clinics and to impose a moratorium on all types of privatization of work and tasks performed in the public sector.

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–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews

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