A Turd Way?

So, the Ralph has begun his pronouncements on what Health Care in Alberta will look like. In a speech delivered to The Canadian Club, Ralph started talking about a "Third Way" for health care. Of course, when you review the content of Ralph's speech, it glibly ignores any specifics of just what this "Third Way"(tm, pat. pend.) might actually be.

So, off into the land of exploring the Alberta Government's website to try and pin down what this is really about. After a certain amount of poking around, I found a page entitled "New plan for health care in Alberta". The optimist in me looks at this page hoping that it is going to give some clarity to what the government is actually considering. Sadly, all it contains is a vague rehash of Klein's speech, and a few links to things like the Mazankowski report. Notably, it conveniently ignores the Federal Romanow report on Health Care. However, on the whole, it's not too informative.

Until you follow the link that points to a backgrounder on the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR). Here, we get the first couple of clues as to what Ralph may be alluding to."Dispute Resolution Mechanism for the Canada Health Act ". Hmm - so what Ralph is basically signalling is that he is expecting his proposals to break the interpretation of the Canada Health Act. Anybody else braced for another pissing match with Ottawa?

The Alberta "Health and Wellness" department website is slightly more informative. With a page that tries to lay out what appear to be some broad policy direction statements. Per se, I cannot criticize the overall statements made on this page - they are essentially motherhood statements that don't tell you much about the particulars of the government's direction. With Ralph, the issue is seldom with the high level direction so much as what the words used actually mean. For example, there's talk of giving the various regional authorities more autonomy to be "innovative". Innovative is a very vague term. Does it mean that they are going to be tasked with moving medicine forward with innovation in treatment, or does it mean that they are going to be "innovative" with how they deliver treatment? Does innovation mean making existing systems work better, or selling them to the highest bidder?

Sadly, I think Albertans are going to be kept in the dark for quite some time yet.