But not so for private, for-profit health care facilities.

Over eight years, the provincial government poured more than $4 billion into for-profit surgical and medical imaging facilities.

The provincial direction favouring investor-owned facilities over public hospitals didn’t happen overnight. In 2023, the Ontario government passed Bill 60, which has been used to expand the role of for-profit health care facilities.

Since the passage of Bill 60, the provincial government has made three big moves to privatize core hospital services by awarding funding to private facilities for MRI and CT scans, endoscopies and orthopedic surgeries.

Over the last three years, $280 million in public subsidy has been committed to for-profit health care delivery — the largest injection of public funding into for-profit health care outside of Quebec.

The growth of this for-profit industry is significant — especially at a time when public hospitals are unable to maintain current service levels, according to a recent report from the Financial Accountability Office.

While Ontario’s public hospitals are being told that the cupboard is bare, the provincial government is able to find significant year-over-year increases for the private health care industry.

In 2024-25 alone, provincial payments to the for-profit medical imaging and surgical industry totalled $674 million — jumping by 48 per cent from $457 million in 2017-18.

What remains particularly concerning is that public payments to for-profit facilities performing surgeries and medical imaging increased at faster rates than public hospital funding. In the three years following Bill 60, the average annual growth rate of public payments to for-profit medical imaging and surgical facilities increased two to four times that of public hospital funding.

What’s worse is that we would have no idea of the true extent to which the provincial government favours corporate health care providers over public hospitals because this information is not publicly disclosed by the government.

The Ontario government has failed to transparently report how much public funding is flowing to private health care facilities. It was only through freedom-of-information requests that these troubling findings have come to light.

The Ontario Public Accounts report $84.7 million transferred to these private facilities, while expenditure reporting obtained by FOI puts payments at $659 million.

This means that the Public Accounts underreported payments to for-profit facilities by 778 per cent in 2024-25.

It would be one thing if the public dollars flowing into private profits were delivering clear results for Ontarians. But they’re not.

Evidence shows that for-profit surgeries can be two to three times more expensive than performing the same procedures in public hospitals, performing surgeries privately poses risks to patient safety and care quality, and contributes to longer — not shorter — public wait times.

The Ontario government began ramping up the outsourcing of surgeries and diagnostics in 2018, with a big push following Bill 60. Any significant policy direction should be evaluated to see if it’s achieving its stated goals.

Between 2017 and 2025, median wait times for eight of 12 publicly funded priority procedures increased in Ontario, including MRI scans, cataract surgeries and all cancer surgeries.

Despite the 185 per cent increase in public funding for privately delivered ophthalmologic procedures between 2017 and 2025, cataract surgery wait times increased.

Rather than doubling down on privatization, the Ontario government would be wise to focus on policy strategies grounded in proven evidence and experience, both in Canada and internationally.

An obvious place to start would be proper public hospital funding — increasing by at least six per cent annually — so that hospital operating rooms and MRI machines are idle no more.

Andrew Longhurst is a senior researcher and political economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and author of Not Adding Up: Surgical and Diagnostic Privatization in Ontario.

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