You just can't get away from it: health care, the continuing saga, continues to make front page news in Ontario. Hot on the heels of last week's handouts from Ottawa comes another story guaranteed to make taxpayers sick to their stomachs. It concerns the high wages paid to unionized health service personnel in Ontario hospitals - wages that consume taxes faster than a Dalton McGuinty budget can raise them.

The information comes from two incongruent sources: a consultants' report commissioned by the provincial Ministry of Health, and a study of hospital worker pay produced by the Fraser Institute. Both conclude that many Ontario public sector workers are being paid more than their private sector counterparts for doing the same jobs - and that hospitals could become more efficient by ending this disparity.

The consultants' report examined the administrative and service operations of the province's most efficient hospitals, and concluded that other hospitals could save almost $200 million a year by emulating their best practices. According to the Toronto Star, "hospital insiders" say those savings would be achieved by contracting out work of clerical and support staff and abrogating so-called "successor rights" in union contracts. (Those rights mean that when work is outsourced to the private sector, new workers get the same inflated remuneration as the public sector workers they replace, thus discouraging efficiency and preventing taxpayers from reaping any savings.)

According to the Fraser Institute study, Ontario's mid and lower-level unionized workers receive relatively high pay - often 20% higher - than that of comparable private sector jobs, and of hospital workers in other provinces. For example, the average salary of a light duty cleaner is $30,433 a year - a third more than cleaners in other industries, while food counter attendants earn $29,709 a year - one and a half times the average wage for the same job in other sectors.

By contracting out these types of jobs, Premier McGuinty would follow the same approach taken by the Liberal government of British Columbia. BC taxpayers now save $63 million a year, money which is re-directed into essential health services. Mind you, changes there didn't come without a fight from the province's powerful unions, including an illegal strike which shut down hospitals. Similar conflicts would likely be repeated in Ontario. Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents about 25,000 hospital workers, has already stated that his members "would go to war in a heartbeat" if Premier McGuinty outsourced jobs to the private sector and brought wages to market levels.

In other words, the union wants to hold taxpayers hostage and keep paying inflated wages to its workers. Mr. Ryan's objections only bolster the argument that more, not less, private health services would make for a more efficient health care system. Private hospitals or clinics employing non-unionized personnel at fair market wages would be able to provide more affordable care than the state monopoly system. This would create competition for bids on government health care contracts, saving money, providing choice, and encouraging innovation.

Ideology and union dogma cannot be allowed to stand in the way of better health. As waiting lines stretch ever-longer and health care budgets grow more bloated, the question becomes: how much longer will resistance to private services continue to cripple the system And more important, whose side is the premier on: that of union members - or taxpayers