$393M in contracts given to private health-care clinics in B.C. over 6 years, report finds

Health authorities in B.C. have given out about $393 million worth of contracts to private clinics to provide surgeries and medical imaging over the past six years, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). 

That money is going toward low-risk surgeries, such as endoscopy, cataracts and "low acuity" orthopedics, report author Andy Longhurst told The Early Edition host Stephen Quinn.

The issue, Longhurst adds, is that money and staff are being taken away from the public sector.

"There's no question that there has been and continues to be extraordinary pressure on our public health-care system," said Longhurst, a health policy analyst with the CCPA, an independent think-tank. 

"The challenge with providing and entrenching for-profit facilities is they're relying on the same workforce that we need right now in our public system."

Health Minister Adrian Dix disputes this. During a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, he told reporters the suggestion that the province is silently supporting private healthcare is "wildly inaccurate." 

"We would have been happy to provide accurate information had we been approached to do so," Dix said.

He said health authorities contracted $27.2 million to private clinics in 2021 — 0.23 per cent of the $11.8 billion health authorities spent in total over the same period.

In 2021 there were more than 13,000 contracted surgeries, or four per cent of total surgeries, Dix said.

"It's always patients first. The best way to serve patients is to build [the] public health care system, and that's precisely what we did, what we're doing, and what we're going to continue to do."

Longhurst says another concern is the annual dollar amount for contracted surgeries continues to grow. In the 2015-16 year under $10 million in contracts for surgeries was given out, he found; by 2020-21, it was nearing $30 million. 

"Every day we hear another story of shuttered health-care services and hospitals in our public system. If we're expecting that same staff to be working in for-profit facilities, we're going to make our staffing shortages in the public system worse," he said.

In July, B.C.'s Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal from Dr. Brian Day over his failed B.C. Supreme Court challenge around the Medical Protection Act, which prevents doctors in B.C. from billing patients above the rate paid through the Medical Services Plan (MSP) and prohibits the sale of private insurance that covers treatment provided under MSP.

Dix applauded the judgment, saying he was "extremely pleased" with the decision, and vowed to "vigorously defend" the public system.

Before the B.C. Supreme Court judgment, Day argued that "if you were told it was going to be six weeks before you could get a biopsy, you should have the right to have private insurance kick in so you could get that done right away. If there was a cancer growing in any of us, we would want to reserve that right."

In dismissing Day's appeal, the B.C. appeal court judge said he saw nothing to suggest unrestrained private health care would reduce wait times in the public system and, in fact, most experts testified that wait times would actually increase — something Longhurst agrees with. 

"We actually have research that was done here in B.C. that showed the same procedure done in a private clinic was nearly four times as expensive [as when it was] done in a public hospital," he said.  

"A lot of that has to do with the fact that you have a profit margin built in and you're duplicating a lot of the administrative structures that we already have in our public hospital system."