Playing Arrogantly With the People’s Money: eHealth Ontario Under Fire
There is an old saying in Ontario farm country. It goes something like this. When the government gets a hold of something, it turns to manure (there is another word for it) I think you know what I mean. So over the last two weeks as the government defended eHealth Ontario CEO regarding bonus payments and severance packages that old farm saying came to mind. With people in southwestern Ontario fighting to keep the Wallaceburg hospital, the money being thrown around in the eHealth fiasco must be unsettling.
For those of you who don’t know eHealth Ontario was set up last year to create a province wide computerized health record system by 2015. At first glance it sounds like an academic exercise, putting our province wide health records on a computer database to better streamline health care in Ontario. With the government increasingly finding itself in a deficit position, finding efficiencies in the healthcare field might seem a win-win situation. However, with Ontario going through some of the worst economic times in years, with unemployment rates close to 14% in our worst off cities the optics of throwing money around at eHealth Ontario had become Premier Dalton McGuinty’s worst nightmare. He defended it for quite some time but at the end of the day it became just too embarrassing when ordinary Ontarians are losing their jobs and their homes.
eHealth Ontario got in trouble for a number of reasons. There was a problem of the $5 million in contracts, which were given out without a competitive bid from anybody other than people known to eHealth Ontario. It’s hard to believe something like that could be done but it got the political opposition rolling. Then there was the eHealth Ontario CEO, Sarah Kramer who gave herself $114,000 bonus after only five months on the job. There was also reportedly $50,000 spent refurbishing her office and consultants seemingly were everywhere.
It was a great example of government turning something into garbage. For instance one consultant actually charged the government a $1.65 for a cup of tea from Tim Hortons. Another consultant asked herself some questions, then answered her own questions and put in an expense account for that. It was delusional thinking at best and it is an example where government might have a good idea but some people simply think they are entitled to their entitlement and in 2009 that just doesn’t work anymore.
The true culprit in this is not necessarily eHealth Ontario. In my mind the true culprit is the government of Ontario and health Minister, David Kaplan. For many days and weeks the opposition in Ontario has pillared David Kaplan and Premier Dalton McGuinty for allowing the eHealth Ontario scandal to grow. Clearly, it was on their watch that playing so grossly and arrogantly with the people’s money became somewhat a game at eHealth Ontario. At the end of the day they finally fired the eHealth CEO whereupon she was given a $317,000 savage package just to walk away.
There is certainly a lot more to this. For instance, interim progressive conservative leader Bob Runciman has described eHealth “as an incestuous little game, and there’s no way that they can hold each other accountable “. I don’t know about that but you can be sure that the political ramifications from this will surely live for weeks and months to come. A dirty deal is a dirty deal and their half-life is a lot longer than the 24-hour news cycle.
There is so much wrong about this especially at a time of economic recession when many communities are finding hospitals being threatened of closing. However I think what is more wrong is the simple attitude of entitlement, which certainly doesn’t end with eHealth Ontario. It is so foreign to me being in the private sector but in the higher annals of the public sector that type of attitude is rampant. In the large healthcare economy of this province, those attitudes are not very surprising. You would think in an era where private sector executives have been discredited over taking large bonuses at companies that have lost billions, some of that would trickle down into the public sector. However it looks to me all of that was lost on the people who forged eHealth Ontario..
There surely will be a political cost to this. For instance in the next provincial election in 2011, you can bet the opposition parties will be bringing up eHealth Ontario as the poster child of government waste and arrogance. There is no way to look at this in a good way. eHealth Ontario will always be equated as a dirty deal. Now it’s up to Premier McGuinty to pick up the pieces.