TORONTO—There has been a national explosion of private health facilities with little policing by the federal or provincial governments, a report says.
The Ontario Health Coalition said it found evidence in private clinics of a 89 possible violations of the Canada Health Act in five provinces, including Ontario.

The violations include extra-billing patients for medically-necessary services or selling queue-jumping services for a fee of thousands of dollars that let patients quickly access family doctors and specialists.
The first for-profit MRI clinics opened 10 years ago, but in the last five years private surgical and boutique clinics have opened.
Every part of the country has been the target of for-profit clinics, except for Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut, the report found.
The coalition said there are 42 for-profit magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography clinics, 72 private surgical hospitals (excluding cosmetic surgery facilities), and 16 “boutique” physician clinics in Canada.
Their report, “Eroding Public Medicare: Lessons and Consequences for For-Profit Health Care Across Canada,” was being released today.
“The contention that for-profit health care can exist along with a public system is not true,” said Natalie Mehra, the report’s author and director of the coalition.
“It is a take-away from the public health care system,” she charged.
The deep cuts to Canada’s health sector in the mid-1990s set the stage for a privatized system, she said. So now American health delivery systems are vying for a share of the market.
Federal and provincial governments have not been fast enough to respond to the changing market, she added. “We need to build the public pressure to make them do that,” said Mehra.
The health coalition also noticed wait times appear higher in areas with the most privatization as health-care workers stretch their time between hospital and private clinic.
For instance, Montreal is one of the hardest spots to get a family doctor, yet has quite a few private “boutique” clinics selling two-tier care for wealthy executives and companies, the report noted.
The vast majority of people can’t afford to pay the private clinics’ prices so they wait longer to see a doctor.
“For-profit clinics siphon out scarce specialists’ time and [schedule] medically-unnecessary procedures,” Mehra said.
In Ontario and Manitoba, Mehra said, they found local hospitals have reduced MRI hours because technologists have gone to for-profit clinics.