After the Ontario government has extended the occupancy agreement without making too much noise, Ontario’s Long-Term Care homes – regardless of the number of residents they host or how badly they have been affected by Covid-19 – will be funded in full until August.
The agreement also suggests that the managers, investors and shareholders of long-term care will “sail” into the pandemic largely without incurring the economic devastation that other companies in the province have suffered. “In my opinion, long-term care is one of those rare types of industries where losses are shared and profits are privatized,” said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of Geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
In normal times, the profit margins in Long-Term Care in Ontario are not huge, but they are constant. Before the pandemic there were thousands more people waiting for a bed in the province’s LTC facilities than there were beds available.
However, the pandemic has changed the game. Thousands of LTC residents died during the first two waves of Covid-19. Some homes have lost dozens of residents, in a single facility in Barrie, the virus has killed 70 elderly people. While this was happening, new transfers to Long-Term Care homes slowed, hospitals largely stopped transferring eligible patients altogether, while elderly people in the community generally decided to stay away from these LTC and the province suspended entry to older homes.
By the end of 2020, nearly 14,000 long-stay care beds in Ontario were empty. For operators, this should have meant a serious liquidity crisis. But instead the province agreed to pay them as if they were fully booked, first until September 2020 and then until the end of March 2021. Finally, on March 26, the Provincial Ministry of Health and Long Term Care informed all homes that the targets regarding the number of residents hosted would be suspended, once again, until the end of August this year.
According to some experts in the sector all this made sense because the owners of the houses were still paid, but they also needed to operate: even with some empty beds, they had to pay the staff, buy food, maintain strict protocols against Covid and be ready, in the future, to welcome new residents.
Donna Duncan, chief executive of the Ontario Long-Term Care Association, rejects the idea that the provincial funding agreement has something to do with profit: “It serves to keep housing operators and available beds stable,” she said. However, the agreement protects the profit margin of for-profit companies and ensures that executives responsible for securing those profits can continue to be paid. As first reported by David Milstead of the Globe and Mail, Chartwell, which operates 23 Long-Term Care homes in Ontario, paid more in executive bonuses in 2020, the year the CovidD-19 pandemic arrived in Ontario, compared to the previous year.
