"EHealth in its current form has been a disaster," he told The Canadian Press.
He's right on that score, but guess what? Back in 2003, before the Liberals took office, there was something called the Smart Systems for Health Agency. It was a Tory initiative, which was also supposed to do the same thing, in a different way, with a different name. It was a disaster, too.
Those with long memories will recall that before the Tories and Smart System there was an NDP government. While premier Bob Rae had no plans to create an expensive electronic health record system, he did manage to decimate health care by delisting hospital services and slashing nursing staff under something called the Social Contract.
So as bad as eHealth is - and make no mistake, it qualifies as a genuine, full-blown scandal - it would behoove Hudak and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath to think before they speak. All three parties have governed Ontario since 1990, and all three parties have done their best to ruin health care.
The only saving grace for the NDP and the Conservatives is that they didn't seem to do it on purpose. They were just incompetent.
Hudak, who was in the Mike Harris government that created the SSHA, has repeatedly charged that the Liberals squandered more than $1 billion in taxpayer money on eHealth. He said so again this week, but it's simply not true.
When Auditor General Jim McCarter began investigating in 2008, he looked at both eHealth and the former Smart Systems Health Agency. Then he concluded "successive Ontario governments" had wasted $1 billion. The Liberals and Conservatives, he said, were both to blame for the outcome.
In an extensive investigation, CBC News revealed that a Deloitte & Touche review in 2006 showed SSHA was worse than anyone knew. It had made "little or no meaningful progress," lacked strategic direction and had privacy policy issues. In other words, from a functional standpoint, it was no different than its successor, eHealth.
It's entirely possible the price tag has risen for the Liberals in the past few years, given the untendered contracts, the $3,000-a-day consultants, the conflicts of interest and the cronyism. The shocking revelations brought down health minister David Caplan in 2009, but it didn't change anything. EHealth continued to flounder, but it was soon overtaken by other scandals, most notably Ornge and its life-and-death consequences.
If there's an expedient and logical way to fix this mess, the people of Ontario would like to hear it. It isn't enough for Hudak to heap all his scorn on the Liberals, saying: "The old bureaucracy at eHealth, you won't recognize, you won't see that old eHealth anymore." What will we see? The old SSHA that was its predecessor?
Should it be this difficult to digitize our health records? It's been 10 years now, and the Liberals likely won't last long enough to reach their 2015 "completion" date.
Hudak, Horwath and newly anointed Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne have no business taking potshots at each other. There's enough blame to go around for what ails Ontario's health care. It's called politics.
---
Quelle/Source: The Windsor Star, 01.02.2013
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
