Ontario’s hospital funding model unsustainable, inequitable: health economist

As municipalities in Niagara and across the province struggle with increasing demands on property tax dollars, health economist Asif Khowaja says it may be time to change the way new hospitals are funded.

Khowaja said health care is a provincial mandate “and it’s the province’s responsibility to cover it 100 per cent.”

By downloading 10 per cent of that cost to municipalities through local share contributions for new builds, “there’s a big question mark around how this can be sustained in the future and it could lead to inequities in the system.”

Khowaja, an associate professor with Brock University’s h e alth sciences department, said 10 per cent also appears to be an arbitrary number selected decades ago, rather than one derived from “research-based evidence.”

“My question, as a he