As Ontario pumps millions into private health care, public health will continue to suffer

Iris Gorfinkel
11 minutes ago
2 min read

June 5, 2025

“Governments get ensnared into a vicious cycle of their own making: The longer waits grow, the more pressure builds for them to deliver services,” write Drs. Iris Gorfinkel and Andrew Longhurst. “Private facilities seem like a quick fix, but it leaves the public system with fewer health-care workers, which only further exacerbates public wait times. It’s a domino effect that’s difficult to stop.” Dreamstime

By Iris Gorfinkel and Andrew Longhurst Contributors

Iris Gorfinkel is a family physician and founder of PrimeHealth Clinical Research. Andrew Longhurst is a political economist and health policy researcher at Simon Fraser University.

Patient: “How long is the wait?”

Family doctor: “We’ll have to see.”

The truth? Typical wait times for MRI scans and hip replacements jumped by 30 per cent in Ontario over the decade leading up to 2023.

Bad as these trends are, waits are about to get worse. But rather than focus limited resources on the public system, Ontario plans to more than double the funding for private surgical and diagnostic facilities.

The new budget will add another $280 million over the next two years to the $275 million already spent on investor-owned facilities. The grand total amounts to well over half-a-billion taxpayer dollars paid into the pockets of private facilities over five years for cataract surgeries, joint replacements, and CT and MRI scans.

That leaves half a billion dollars less to make sure that every Ontarian has access to a family doctor. Where does that leave the 1-in-4 Ontarians expected to lose access to primary care by 2026? Yet the funding slated to connect 300,000 people to primary care health teams this year is a relatively paltry $235 million. It’s a sum that barely scratches the surface, given that 4.4 million Ontarians won’t have a family doctor by next year.

The pool of qualified health professionals is limited. A worker hired by a private facility leaves one less available to work in the public system. Consider Alberta — as funding increased for surgeries performed in private facilities, the workforce shifted to for-profit facilities.