On Health Care and the Alberta "Proposition"

Once in a while, the people that I talk to regularly turn their hand to a bit of writing - the following entry comes to me from that source - and I thought it was worth a read. (warning - it's long...)

Our benevolent Alberta Government has come out with a little announcement regarding their Health Care initiatives plan.

A little history first.

Klein and Co. have very deliberately, over the past term in office, underfunded and or cut services and blown up hospitals in a bid to weaken the current system and make it appear as if there is actually a crisis that cannot be fixed without a complete revamp of the Health Care System.

One of the Alberta Governments most interesting moves about two years ago came about through a couple of actions, the first action was the implementation of a plan to give Alberta corporations a 142 million dollar break on taxes. (This means the government will now loose 142 million dollars in revenue)
About a week after that announcement Klein announces that Health Care costs have risen uncontrollably and that they are now 70 million dollars short and that they are going to have to raise the Health Care premiums to compensate. Basically put, the Alberta tax payer has just funded at least 50 percent of the corporate tax break.

The removal of some of the members of the CRHC district boards that had publicly expressed a concern about the funding of Health Care.

Klein has made several public comments over the past couple of years that indicate that he has a plan of action that has, as its ultimate goal, the privatization of the Health Care system. Indeed he has recently made comments that state that they "may violate the Canada Health Act". These comments along with the announcement that they will reveal all two days after the election makes me think that the Alberta Government is about to make a move towards privatization fairly quickly and are probably going to rely on an expected federal government run by Harper to support any moves in that direction.

And now......

The latest announcement out of Gary Mar, (the Minister in charge of Health Care) in an attempt to ward off any potentially damaging press, indicates that there will not be any violation of the Canada Health Act. Then he slips in this little comment " that after consultations with the citizens of this province I cannot guarantee that any revisions to our plan would not violate the Canadian Health Act ". As well it should be mentioned that the information released today contains absolutely no specifics and that there is no mention that medicare will be respected.

Also mentioned in the release was the following:
The Alberta government said the plan will include "innovative models of new health care complexes within the publicly funded system," significant new spending on health operating costs and health capital projects and more full-service primary care centres. (Courtesy of the Globe and Mail)

So now, lets decipher this statement. The comment regarding publicly funded system makes no mention about not providing the service through a private for profit mechanism.
The next statement about significant spending on health operating costs and health capital projects has two possible motives, the first is to prepare the public for another round of increases to the premiums in order to finance the initiatives and the second motive is inclusion of P3's as a method to implement the capital projects, which the government would love to do as it removes the initial major cost to their books that would normally occur if they built themselves. (This goes back to the concept that says that it is wrong to run a deficit of any kind).

The Health Care mechanism in Alberta is in serious trouble. If the Alberta Tories are given free rein they are going to privatize the entire system and in the process create a Health Care model that is both two tiered and profit driven. We need a central government that is strong and will stand up to the provinces on issues like this and say NO.