A grassroots campaign that John Hazelwood and Alan Powell believe will help make the lives of the most vulnerable in the province a little easier, and perhaps a little less painful — especially on the wallet.
The object of their offence couldn’t be any more loathed, or any more complex: hospital parking fees.
When they started the group “Fair Hospital Parking Charges” three years ago, they expected it would not be a simple task to ask cash-strapped hospitals to stop charging exorbitant parking rates, ranging from $14 to $28 per day. It hasn’t been.
See some GTA examples
“We feel there is a large portion of the population that can’t afford it, and our concern is does this keep them from going to the hospital?” said Hazelwood. “Our belief is that there has to be a more humane way to raise this money than on the backs of those people who have to use the facility.”
The group first approached the local Markham Stouffville Hospital to lower its rates, which can run up to $19 per day. The hospital responded that revenue from parking, around $3 million, was used directly for patient care and would be difficult to replace.
So the group tried a different approach. Over the past few months, its members approached and gained the support of nearly a dozen municipal councils in the GTA. The Town of Aurora recently passed a motion in support. Some of the councils, including Oshawa and Markham, have passed resolutions and sent copies to the Ministry of Health, in which they ask for a parking fee freeze. Few have heard back.
Valuable revenue
Changing the status quo is easier said than done. In Ontario, hospitals depend heavily on parking revenues to pay for services. The province funds hospitals up to 74 per cent, and the remaining funds are the responsibility of each hospital, according to the Ontario Hospital Association. Parking, cafeteria fees and other costs make up the bulk of the shortfall.
“The hospital’s point of view is to try to balance the convenience of parking with the need to generate revenue,” said Anthony Dale, vice-president of policy and public affairs for the OHA. “As not-for-profit organizations, their core agenda is patient care. Revenue from parking helps them achieve this goal.”
Parking revenues for GTA hospitals range from $1 million to $10 million, and are mostly used to pay for health-care services, research and equipment. Some of the revenue is used by hospitals to pay for parking services or to fund parking structures.
Patients and their families know first-hand the importance of the money, and don’t want to bite the hand that heals them. But the burden of paying the ever-increasing parking fees can be immense.
“When you are on such a limited income, to have to put several hundred dollars a month toward parking, it really hurts,” said Daphne Polo, a single mother of two and a frequent visitor to the Hospital for Sick Children. Her 6-year-old son Eric was born with Diamond-Blackfan anemia, a rare disorder affecting only 55 children in Canada, in which he doesn’t produce red blood cells. They visit the hospital at least twice a week.
“We have been going there since he was born and we are not going to stop until he is 18.”
Polo, who is not working so she can take care of her two children, said the bulk of government assistance she receives is used to pay for Eric’s physiotherapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy. Every time she pays for parking, which adds up to just over $700 a year, she feels it’s “money she’s taking away from therapy that could be improving my son’s health.”
Last year, when Sick Kids increased the parking daily maximum to $20 from $16, Polo “had tears rolling down my face” when she saw the sign. When she complained to her social worker, the hospital offered a one-time fund to help her pay for a few months of parking. “I was really appreciative, but once that’s gone, what do I do?” she said.
“Parking should be the last thing on my mind, but it’s often the first thing I think about when his next appointment is coming up.”
The group Ontario Parents Advocating for Children with Cancer (OPACC) said it was inundated with complaints when the rates went up at Sick Kids last fall. The group recently took the concerns of 3,000 families to senior management at the hospital and sat down with them to discuss options.
Like many hospitals, Sick Kids already offers multi-day and long-stay passes that give families a discounted rate. And like a number of GTA hospitals, it offers financial assistance to families with very limited means who can prove their need.
Limited options
Beyond that, the options appear to be limited.
“What’s the solution to the parking fee problem? That’s the million-dollar question,” said James Thomson, who works with OPACC.
As a start, patients and their families would like to have some say in when parking rates go up — instead of being surprised at the cash register. Polo believes hospitals should have a discounted rate for families who have been coming for years, or those who make hundreds of trips a year. Thomson said the group is waiting to hear back from the hospital on possible solutions.
In 2011, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an editorial calling for the eradication of parking fees, inspired by a similar move in Scotland and Wales in 2008.
“Parking fees are a barrier to health care and add avoidable stress to patients who have enough to deal with,” the editorial said. “They can and sometimes do interfere with a clinical consultation, reducing the quality of the interaction and therefore of care.”
But little has changed here since the editorial came out. If anything, the rates are at risk of increasing, says the OHA. In the 2013 federal budget, the government announced that hospital parking lots run by hospital foundations (a small number) would no longer be exempt from GST/HST. Currently, most hospitals simply include this in the price of parking.
The OHA is in talks with the federal government to exempt these hospital lots from this tax hike — which will either have to absorbed by hospitals or passed on to visitors. Some hospitals, such as Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, have already done so in anticipation.
“Until May of this year, it had been five years since we raised parking rates for patients and visitors,” said Craig DuHamel, vice-president, communications at Sunnybrook. “Due in part to the new federal requirement to levy HST, we have had to increase parking rates.”
The Ministry of Health, which has received 41 formal complaints about hospital parking rates since 2011, says the fees are set by individual hospitals and are not under provincial jurisdiction. Parking rates are often set by hospital administration.
Hazelwood’s group is not asking for the elimination of fees altogether. It wants a cap on parking fees, or the reduction of rates to make them more reflective of the local community. “If you pay a few dollars for street parking, you should be charged a similar rate for parking at the hospital.”
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Noor Javed
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