This CUPE research report can help you if you are fighting to keep a hospital in the public system, or want to bring your P3 hospital back into the public system.
P3s - no, not a parking level - but a type of private for-profit service. Governments and corporations call them “public-private partnerships” but they really aren’t partnerships at all - they are a way for corporations to profit from public tax dollars, while giving all of us higher costs and lower quality. As well, P3s usually mean job cuts especially in rural areas!
Some of the report’s highlights:
- Taxpayers across the country stand to lose billions of valuable health care dollars if P3 hospitals continue, since Auditor Generals (BC and Ontario) have found P3 hospitals waste more than $100 million each time they are built.
- P3 hospitals:
- Waste valuable health care tax dollars
- Are secretive and serve to undermine the country as local firms lose out to large multinational corporations
- Mean fewer hospital beds and poorer hospital quality especially as P3 hospital contracts can be 30 years and are difficult to alter even as technology and health care rapidly change
- CUPE calls on the provinces to consider tearing up existing P3 hospital contracts and partly use federal funding and public bonds to fund public hospital building, and for Auditor Generals to thoroughly investigate all existing and potential P3 hospitals.
