Protecting, fixing health care at the heart of NDP’s Change for the Better campaign

TORONTO — At the Regent Park Community Health Centre Wednesday, Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath joined community health advocates, front-line care workers, and NDP candidates to lay out her plan for better health care in Ontario – a plan she says is a top priority for her and the NDP.

“Health care is at the heart of my plan,” she said. “Imagine a province where everyone gets the care they need, without the long waits. Where families know they’ll get the prescriptions they need, and the dental care they need – and no one ends up in the ER just because they couldn’t afford those things. Instead of waits getting longer and hospitals getting squeezed more every year, imagine a province where health care gets better every year.

“Better health care is not a just dream – it’s possible. And it’s my plan.”

The last Conservative government fired 6,000 nurses, closed 28 hospitals and slashed over 7,000 hospital beds. Under Kathleen Wynne, just since 2015, another 1,600 nurses have been cut.

“The waits in health care are painfully long. Hospitals are overcrowded. All the people lined up in ER waiting rooms, and all those who spend days in hospital hallways are being hurt by the hallway medicine crisis,” said Horwath. “Kathleen Wynne hurt families with her frozen hospital budgets, and now Doug Ford wants to cut even deeper. He’s promised to privatize everything he can – which puts the health care we all count on at risk.

“Mr. Ford and his $6 billion in cuts would do even more damage – we can’t give him the chance.”
Horwath has released a fully costed platform – Change for the Better – which lays out plans to fix the health care. That plan includes:

• Investing $1.2 billion in Ontario hospitals immediately
• Stopping the layoffs of frontline care workers
• Introducing dental care for all Ontarians, and a universal pharmacare plan – a drug plan that covers everyone
• Spending $19 billion on hospital building expansion
• Transforming mental health and addictions care, including hiring at least 2,600 new mental health and addictions professionals
• Asking the very richest to pay one percentage point more on income over $220,000 and two percentage points more on income over $300,000, to help deliver better health care for everyone