Hospitals are the main focus of the government’s health care cuts. They do not see community hospitals as providing a broad range of services to the local ... [Read More]population, but instead wish to remove an untold range of services from local hospitals and transfer them to specialized private clinics. The proposal would remove the most lucrative, high volume and easiest procedures from community hospitals. The remaining community hospitals would be left with the most difficult services. If they chose to compete with the private clinics, they would have to specialize in a narrow range of services. The government’s plan is the opposite of one-stop, integrated public health care. This proposed privatization of surgeries and diagnostic tests is in addition to the aggressive attempts to remove non-acute care services from hospitals (e.g. outpatient clinics, complex continuing care, rehabilitation, long-term care, primary care, etc.). As acute care currently accounts for only about 1/3 of current hospital funding, these attacks are a grave threat to the viability of community hospitals, and in fact we are now seeing a wave of hospital shut-downs that is somewhat reminiscent of the Mike Harris era. Despite the government’s rhetoric about keeping care non-profit, services that are being cut from local hospitals now are being privatized to for-profit owned corporations. Even if the private clinics did start out as non-profit (which has not been the case so far) the whole system of private clinics could be privatized with a stroke of a pen.