Health care is bankrupting Ontario

But our health care problem is nothing compared to the radical leftist momentum in politics

Ontario spends $81 billion a year on health care. With a population of approximately 14.4 million, that amounts to $5,625 per person.

Median household income in Ontario after taxes is $79,500 across 5.5 million households. A household on average comprises 2.9 persons in Ontario. Assuming health care costs are well-distributed, health care costs (directly or indirectly) amount to over $16,000 per household.

Household budgets are tight. On average, Ontarians have the following household expenditures (2021 data - inflation makes the picture worse). I have excluded health care from the list since it is captured in the $16,000 above but for OTC drugs and uninsured portions of prescription drug fees which average about $1,000 per household which is included.

$21,000 for shelter
$11,000 for transportation
$18,000 income taxes
$10,000 for food
$6,000 for household supples
$4,000 for recreation
$4,000 for household furnishings and equipment
$3,000 for personal care
$2,000 for education
$2,000 for gifts and occasions
$1,000 OTC drugs and uninsured Rx fees

Add to that the direct or indirect effect of Trudeau’s “carbon tax”.

Half of Ontarians have incomes below that figure, but they still need shelter, transportation, food, etc. Fortunately, that half pays almost no tax and they barely get by. Except for the “carbon tax”, lower taxes won’t make their lives much more affordable since they pay little tax. It is certain they are not a likely source of more revenue for governments.

Ontario is home to 36,000 doctors, about one for every 400 persons or expressed differently one for every 138 households.

I see people on Facebook complaining there are 2.5 million Ontarian who don’t have a family doctor. Presumably that means the Province needs about 6,250 more doctors.

The average doctor in Ontario bills the Province about $310,000 per year according to 2021 data. Adding 6,250 doctors would add about $2 billion to Ontario health care costs, assuming the doctor pays for his nurse, office, hospital space, and all the other costs of being a doctor.

But if Ontario health care costs $81 billion annually (as the Ontario government reports) that amounts to $2.25 million per doctor. I assume adding doctors adds costs to all the elements of the health care system that support doctors, and if that is so, the incremental cost to Ontario of adding 6,250 doctors swells to $14 billion. Ontario already collects over $51 billion in taxes annually so taxes would rise to about $65 billion. The added $14 billion is an additional tax on the 5.5 million households, but since only half of those actually pay much tax, it will fall on 2.8 million households and increase their tax bill by close $5,000 per year.

Of course, Ontario does not have a balanced budget, teachers’ unions are crying for smaller class sizes and higher wages, nurses unions echo the same demands, interest on the Provinces massive debt keeps rising, and the top 20% of taxpayers already pay two thirds of all taxes. Think “taxing the rich” will make this problem go away?

Get real.

The pressure on health care, housing and education arises in part from the 1,150,000 immigrants who joined Ontario’s population since 2015 when the Trudeau regime opened the floodgates. These newcomers are welcomed by Canadians as they should be, but before inviting that many people to come political leaders might have done their sums and come to the conclusion that more hospitals, more schools, more clinics, more houses and more doctors would be needed and they would have to paid for since, in an economic sense, they produce nothing but a feeling of well-being and none of the goods needed to house, feed, clothe, transport or entertain the population.

The National Health Institute has published a study that shows that for people who live to 85 years of age or longer, one third of their lifetime health care costs are incurred in the last two years of life. One solution to our health care crisis from a financial point of view is to make health care costs the responsibility of the health care consumer after age 85, or a burden their family should carry rather than the taxpayer. Savings programs could be developed for Canadians informed that this will be the case in (say) twenty years time (to give a sensible transition period) and let people organize themselves to deal with the inevitable cost of growing old.

If people over 85 were responsible for their own health care costs (user pay) the cost of health care paid by society at large would fall by about one third. Absent such a program or some other creative policy, health care costs will bankrupt the Province despite the leftist cries that we don’t have enough family doctors.

The solution is a public-private system with “user pay” for those over 85, with a transition period of at least 20 years to allow people to plan ahead for the change.

Popular? Unlikely.

Effective? Almost certainly.

Society needs to return to the values that predominated before we became a society of “victims” who turn to government to look after everything instead of looking to themselves. Personal responsibility, hard work, strong family ties, and a desire for less government intervention characterized Canada at least until world war one when the Income Tax Act was enacted as a “temporary” measure. Since then, those running for office found it saleable to promise voters government payoffs for their votes and we have created a society heading to outright socialism, an ideology that has worked nowhere on Earth at any time in history.

The leftist ideology is infectious. “Something for nothing” is a popular gimmick. Leftist preach “equality” but work hard to make sure their own lives are “above average”. There is a serious problem growing across Western democracies, and they risk following Venezuela down the rabbit hole of Communism. Think it can’t happen? Here’s a photo of the streets of Philadelphia a few weeks ago.

Ontario’s health care problems will pale to insignificance if the leftist movements in Canada and United States gain momentum and a civil war erupts. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee is farther left than Bernie Sanders. Big Tech is already censoring free speech. Run a Google Search for Donald Trump and the search engine will return articles about Harris, not Trump. Try the same thing with Meta’s AI engine, and get the same result. Ask “Alexa” if you should vote for Trump and get a response that denies entering a political debate but ask if you should vote for Harris and get a lot of reasons why you should (at least until recently when that “bug” was “fixed”).

I ran a Google search for the latest news about Donald Trump entering only “donald trump news”.

Here’s the search return. Notice there are three photos of Harris and none of Trump.

We live in a world where socialists have the inside track in U.S.A. and in Canadian schools and universities. The march towards authoritarian socialism is well underway and will succeed if we don’t wake up and vote to curb its success.