Parking in Waterloo Region

[ookpik]

In cases where hospitals are viewed as taking too much money from parking and flowing it back into their operations, we could look instead at why those hospitals have taken that step to begin with.

The province has frozen payments to hospitals for quite a number of years so they've had to find alternate sources of revenue, including huge increases in parking rates. It was only a few years ago that local hospitals charged $6/day. Now it's double. 

This also explains why there's a Timmy's in almost every hospital these days. That a regional cardiac care centre like St Mary's would allow a vendor of high fat, high sugar junk "food" in their hospital, never mind at their main entrance, is a particularly poignant example of how desperate they must be for revenue. Ditto for GRH.

OTOH medical care will consume as much money as taxpayers can throw at it. Increase funding and you'll soon hear the same pleas for even more. So medical care has to be rationed for that reason. If it was an easy circle to square it would have been done years ago. But I digress...