The proposed cuts to health care in the upcoming regional budget unfairly target senior citizens’ resources. Obviously, the region needs to make budget cuts, since the only other option it has is to implement an unpopular tax increase. But at a time when we are trying to shift the brunt of health care responsibility to the community, does it really make sense to cut funding to regional health care?
The region’s health department is relatively small compared with the region’s other departments. Cutting $1 million from that budget entails more serious personal consequences than cutting, for example, $1 million from the snow-clearing budget. Cuts to the health budget mean cuts to essential programs for senior citizens. Period. There are about 8,000 isolated and vulnerable senior citizens in Ottawa-Carleton and programs funded by the regional health department allow public health nurses to go into their homes, assess their needs and link them to resources. A senior citizen’s ability to stay independent is hindered when programs like Elderly in Need and Seniors’ Health and Independence disappear.
The key to keeping senior citizens healthy is keeping them active. The cuts proposed in the regional budget will sever the city’s seniors from the community and will create a huge need for in-home services.
Isolated people are at high risk of becoming depressed, and depressed people are at high risk of becoming a so-called “burden” on health care.
Those seniors lucky enough to have family to stay with will not be immune to the proposed cuts. Day Away programs, where seniors are picked up at home in the morning and returned after a day of activities, giving care-givers a much-needed break, have been labelled for extinction.
The care-givers support program is also on the chopping block. There are between 15,000-18,000 family care-givers in the region. The average baby-booming care-giver faces the everyday demands of family life, as well as the increasing demands of their aging relatives. The burnout rate for care-givers is already high, another burden on health care.
Regional Coun. Alex Munter says the community services committee has found a way to keep these programs intact without a tax increase, and the committee will be presenting these findings to regional council shortly.
If the council decides to ignore the committee’s recomendations and proceed with a $1 million cut, it will be attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of the region’s residents — those who are least likely to fight back — and while short-sighted cuts may balance the books for now, they only serve to put us in ethical debt later on.
—Dana Dougherty and Tom McLean