Provinces must be willing to make tough choices now if wrenching changes are to be avoided in the future
On Thursday, reports that Ontario would stop sedating patients during colonoscopies, part of a package of cuts intended to save $500 million in health-care spending each year, led to a predictable series of rather indelicate jokes online. You can imagine what they were — “A colonoscopy without sedation is a good metaphor for a Conservative government.” And the like.
The reports and the resulting reaction were, of course, overblown. What is actually being proposed is nothing so dramatic as asking patients to endure a deeply unpleasant procedure without painkillers so that the taxpayers can save a few bucks. The possibility, instead, is that the workflow for the provision of the anesthetic be reworked and be made more efficient.
This isn’t to hand the government a blank cheque. When the proposals are eventually settled upon, the public has every right to consider them on their merits, and if warranted, heap scorn and juvenile jokes upon any of them.
Health care is already, far and away, the most expensive single item in the Ontario budget . It accounts for well over two-fifths of total provincial spending and is a constant source of tension between Ottawa and the provinces, which never seem to have quite enough money to provide the services the population expects. This is only going to get harder in the years ahead, as an aging population strains our system. We have known this problem would come eventually.
What Doug Ford’s government is proposing isn’t anything so dramatic. It’s simply doing the work that needs to be done if the big, wrenching changes are to be avoided. It’s fun to make jokes. But this is no laughing matter. For millions of Canadians, their health care is literally life and death.
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