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The stupidity of this state of affairs was further underlined by its effect on the province’s hospitals. In November of last year, more than 4,600 of the province’s 34,000 hospitals beds were filled by patients waiting to go elsewhere. Many of those people need scarce long-term beds.

The numbers tell a frustrating story

Instead of providing less-expensive long-term care, the previous government used hospitals to store people who didn’t require hospital care. That is a big factor in overloaded hospitals and backed-up emergency wards, and it’s financially irresponsible, too. It costs $500 a day more for hospital care than it does for long-term care. In 2017-18, that bill added up to $170 million. The average person waiting for long-term care in hospital spends 69 days in the queue.

Now, the Ford government is going after the lack of long-term care with a relatively robust plan to build 15,000 beds over five years. That’s a big expansion in a short period of time, but it’s still well short of what would be required for a cost-effective and well-functioning long-term care sector.

Photo by Jack Boland/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

In Ontario, median wait times to access long-term care go from a low of 68 days in the Chatham-Windsor area to a high of 263 days in the Central-East area, which stretches from Scarborough to Haliburton. The provincial median is 152 days. Compare that to British Columbia, which has a median wait time of 12 days. Alberta places 52 per cent of people within 30 days. In Ontario, the situation is so bad that the previous government didn’t even bother to establish any wait time targets. Just as well, they would have been stretch goals any way.