In a scene from The Pitt, emergency department attending Dr. Robby, played by Noah Wyle, explodes at the CEO of a Pittsburgh hospital after being told that the budget can’t support additional beds. Wyle describes patients “coding in waiting rooms” and threatens to tell the media that the hospital’s cost-cutting comes at the cost of patient lives.
But Wyle’s rant isn’t just a Hollywood script.
More Ontario tax dollars go toward health care than any other sector. Ontario’s hospitals are independent corporations that receive the bulk of their funding via the ministry of health. Each year, the province decides how much funding to provide hospitals, based on the services they offer, the unique needs of the populations they serve, and previous funding levels. Yet there is little transparency about how hospitals are funded, or whether they run as efficiently as possible.
So we at the Investigative Journalism Bureau spent months analysing the financial statements of Ontario hospital systems, from Sunnybrook to Sioux Lookout, to answer: Are Ontario hospitals financially sustainable to provide the care expected of them?
We found that 60 per cent of Ontario hospital systems were not able to fully cover their regular bills — like wages, supplies, and utilities — using their operating revenue in 2024/25.
These sprawling deficits have forced some hospitals to borrow money from banks (at least $66 million in 2024/25) to pay their staff and keep beds open. That means millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on bank interest.
Several hospitals in dire straits have even been infused with emergency cash from the ministry, according to letters between the minister of health and Ontario Health, which we obtained through freedom of information legislation.
Those letters are under a strict embargo, meaning hospital CEOs can’t disclose that they received this additional support. That secrecy prevents the public from scrutinizing how the province decides which hospitals require extra cash, and which are left to fend for themselves.
Together with the University of Toronto’s HIVE Lab, we built the first-ever public database detailing the financial health of every Ontario hospital, including their bank loans and one-time ministry funding, previously kept secret.
My editor, Blair Bigham (who is also an emergency physician in Toronto), and I spent six months peering at about 400 public financial statements of Ontario hospital systems and filing freedom of information requests to almost every hospital in the province.
The opportunity to spend several months studying a single system is unthinkable to most reporters today. It’s not surprising — every other data cell in our database costs hours of research and analysis, navigating the ever-more restrictive freedom of information laws and unrelenting bureaucracy.
And yet, without this information, Ontarians wouldn’t know about the millions in interest Ontario hospitals paid to banks just to stay open. They would not know that despite its own legislation, the Ontario government has allowed hospitals to end the year in the red more than 100 times since 2022, compared to only nine times between 2016 and 2020.
Ontarians deserve information about the decisions shaping the future of our health care, because they will bear the cost. By using the Ontario Hospital Finance Explorer, Ontarians can now compare hospitals based on the financial pressures they face and to directly evaluate how well the publicly funded health-care system is performing. This allows them to ask informed questions of the provincial government.
Last year, Ontario, which spends less per person on health care than any other province, dramatically slowed the funding for the health sector. On current projections, the FAO says the province could lose 2,000 hospital beds and 7,000 nurses over the next two years.
Despite this, the ministry of health refused to provide analyses that informed hospital funding this year. Health Minister Sylvia Jones and Premier Doug Ford ignored my emails and phone calls.
The lack of transparency is exactly why this work matters.
Investigative reporting is not shaken by the daily news cycle, shifting beats or the next headline. Being part of a model like the IJB allows us to keep asking questions that bring critical information to Ontarians – even if the answers will take months to obtain.