Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews has ordered Ontario hospitals to stop threatening elderly patients with daily charges of up to $1,800 to “coerce” them to move to the first available nursing home bed.
It is completely inappropriate and unacceptable for any individual in this province in a hospital waiting for long-term care to be charged more than $53.23 per day,” she told the legislature Tuesday.
Hospitals are allowed to charge people $53.23 a day while they are waiting to get into a nursing home, but no more. As the Star has revealed in its ongoing Begging for Care series, hospitals have been threatening patients with charges of up to $1,800 in an attempt to free up hospital beds.
I want you to know that my ministry and my officials are working with the LHIN, with the hospitals, to ensure that they understand the proper application of this policy and that other hospitals, in fact, across the province do understand that it is completely unacceptable to charge anything more than $53.23 a day,” Matthews said.
In a telephone interview later Tuesday, Matthews explained that the ministry is sending reminders to hospitals, through the province’s 14 local health integration networks (LHINS), to let them know the practice is not allowed.
LHINS coordinate health care, including hospital services, in different geographic areas of the province.
Long-term-care homes are people’s homes and there should not be coercion as they move into that home,” Matthews said.
New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath raised the issue in question period.
Families are desperately trying to access the care they need but they’re finding a system in complete shambles. Instead of helping families, the government slaps them with exorbitant fees. Why are families being punished for this government’s failures?” Horwath demanded.
The Star series is highlighting the shortage of home-care services in Ontario and shortcomings in the province’s $1.1 billion Aging at Home strategy. The home-care shortage is contributing to a logjam of patients in hospitals. Patients who no longer need hospital care are stuck in beds because of a lack of home- and long-term care. With hospital beds clogged, emergency departments are filled with seriously ill people waiting to be admitted to a bed.
Hospitals, desperate to clear beds, are using the coercive tactic of threatening to charge patients the same daily non-OHIP rate that they charge out-of-country patients. Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre said it was a mistake to tell 82-year-old Scarborough resident Giuseppina Guarrasi that she would have to pay $1,800 a day. Sunnybrook vice-president Craig Duhamel, said the hospital had instituted the “bed refusal” practice “as a last resort” last year to move large numbers of patients through the hospital, but has since scrapped it.
Matthews defended her government’s track record on home care, but admitted there is more to do.
We do acknowledge that there are challenges in our health sector but we are making tremendous progress,” she said.
We now have 200,000 more people receiving home care supports than when we took office. We are moving forward. We are making progress. Is it perfect? No, but boy, is it a whole lot better? Yes,” she added.
The province’s Aging at Home strategy has been a failure and has caused a crisis in emergency wards throughout the province, said Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod (Nepean-Carleton) in an interview.
It is actually cruel to tap Ontario’s seniors and families with this extra burden given it is the governments direction — or lack there of, that has caused this crisis,” said MacLeod.
The scale of the problem in the Toronto area is massive and the Liberals have “done nothing” to alleviate the lack of long term care beds, she said.
It brings us back to when former health minister George Smitherman said he is going to have a war effectively on this problem and he’d fix the issue. Now it is only getting worse and people have less money in their pockets,” she said. “Our grandmothers and grandfathers are now paying for that. It is just sad.
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