On April 21, “Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister” Matt Jones got up on his hind legs in the Alberta Legislature and spoke the following words:
“We’re looking at developing a voucher program where patients who have waited longer than clinically recommended can go to any approved or accredited provider in Alberta and get that surgery.”
The debate that afternoon was about long waits for surgeries that Albertans are experiencing and which, the claims of Mr. Jones’s United Conservative Government notwithstanding, don’t seem to be getting any better because of the governing party’s policy of investing in for-profit private surgical clinics instead of public health care.
It’s not clear if Mr. Jones’s statement about a voucher system for surgical patients was an accidental slip or an intentional semi-authorized leak of the latest effort by Premier Danielle Smith to Americanize public health care in Alberta as much as possible and as fast as possible.
I lean toward the former – Question Period in the Legislature is a high-pressure arena for the politicians involved – but whatever it was, this is the sort of question that needs to be followed up vigourously by media and that once upon a time in Alberta would have been.
No more, alas. Media inattention is a combination of the decline of legacy media into right-wing clickbaitery and the UCP’s adoption of Trump crony Steve Bannon’s famous stream-of-unconsciousness technique of “flooding the zone” with … stuff. In case you missed it, the stuff the UCP’s strategic brain trust was flooding the zone with last week had mostly to do with Ms. Smith’s priority separation agenda.
Well, this does keep the collective mind of the public off what The Globe and Mail’s Carrie Tait won a National News Award for last week, doesn’t it?
The result, though, was very little news coverage of this extremely concerning development. Indeed, I can only find real news story from single a daily newspaper in Alberta, The Red Deer Advocate.
Readers can look up Mr. Jones’s response in Alberta Hansard, which I’m not going to quote at length here. If they do, it will soon be clear to them that what he had to say was extremely vague and raises many questions for which he offered no answers.
While we know little about this plan, a news release from Alberta’s Friends of Medicare group outlined some of the key problems with voucher-style programs south of the Medicine Line, which the group’s executive director described as “an ideological strategy focused on promoting competition rather than ensuring well-funded facilities to provide quality and availability of care.”
As we know, commercial competition is the path the Smith Government has already decided to take, the Canada Health Act be damned, with almost all aspects of health care. So in that regard at least, this announcement, if that’s what it was, comes as no surprise. Everyone who studies health care understands that vouchers will neither reduce surgical costs nor shorten wait times.
“We could improve access by centralizing our wait lists or by expanding underutilized public capacity,” Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway said. “We don’t need a convoluted voucher scheme to do that.”
“Instead, we have operating rooms sitting empty and unused every single day, because this government would rather double-down on its failed privatization strategy than ensure that our public hospitals are funded and staffed properly. At every turn this government seems determined to further entrench a for-profit health care market, irrespective of the cost or suffering it will have on Albertans waiting for surgeries.”
Nevertheless, there are many questions that need to be answered immediately since this is likely a policy the government is going to push forward to implement.
For example, what process will be used to determine priority for surgical patients at, as Mr. Jones put it, “any approved or accredited provider in Alberta”?
What limits on wait times will be set? Will all kinds of surgery be impacted at once, or will some sort of priority schedule be cobbled together? How will the cost of surgeries be determined? What fees or co-pays will patients be required to pay in addition to the health care system’s share of the costs? What role if any does Mr. Jones imagine the private insurance industry will have in this plan? Or is the insurance industry already “helping” to write the legislation for the UCP?
Above all, when does the government propose to move ahead with this bad idea?
By the way, I put Mr. Jones’s title in scare quotes in the lead because he holds only one of the four health portfolios Premier Smith has invented.
This has not been done, rest assured, because of the complexity of the old Health portfolio, which could be handled by one minister with the assistance of a Parliamentary secretary. It is being done to muddy the waters as the government proceeds with its program of privatizing health care on the U.S. model, a development that should frighten every Albertan.
A health minister is not supposed to run the health care system like a CEO. Her job, or his, is to set the policy direction – something that is clearly now being done in the Premier’s Office.
This is why I think of Mr. Jones and his three colleagues – former health minister Adriana LaGrange, now minister of primary and preventative health services, Rick Wilson, minister of mental health and addiction, and Jason Nixon, minister of assisted living and social services – not by their official titles but as the Four Horsemen of the Health Care Apocalypse.
Here endeth the lesson.
