What’s with these “conservative” politicians, anyway? I thought conservative was supposed to mean “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change … cautiously moderate” and the like?
So here we are, barely 24 hours after another major news story has broken illustrating just how badly public health care mixes with private health services and yet another so-called conservative politician is putting out a major statement advocating more “public-private partnerships” in health.
And no, I don’t mean Danielle Smith, although this is just the sort of market fundamentalist claptrap you’d expect to hear from the leader of the far-right Wildrose Alliance Party. Nope, it was Gary Mar, the front-runner in the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party’s race to become premier of Alberta.
Gary Mar, the man Smith says she’d most like to challenge of all the contenders for the Tory throne because her Wildrose supporters see him as being too far to the left! This is a thought the rest of us might keep in mind as we consider the relative merits of the six, or maybe seven, Conservative leadership candidates. Not one of them is what you’d really call a small-l liberal, no matter what Smith and her minions claim.
And when push comes to shove, probably every one of them will advocate the same “market based solutions” Smith favours, which is probably why the Wildrose Alliance is whistling past the graveyard so loudly nowadays.
Unable to privatize public medicine thanks to determined voter resistance, the province of Alberta has been plunging headlong into the wholesale privatization of continuing care for the elderly.
Notwithstanding pre-election promises to the contrary, under Premier Ed Stelmach, Alberta has been closing regulated public nursing homes and replacing them with tax-subsidized but private for-profit “assisted living” facilities. These businesses appear to be designed to transfer the wealth of the Baby Boom generation into the hands of wealthy nursing home operators, instead of their children where it belongs.
Read the fine print of the Alberta government’s promise to create continuing care beds, and you’ll see that a growing number will be of the high-priced, private, for-profit variety. Needless to say, this is a huge “business opportunity” for the kinds of people who donate loadsa dough to Tory politicians.
So it was big news when Calgary Herald reporter Matt McClure broke a story Monday that dozens of ailing seniors, many of them Canadian war vets, were about to be evicted from a Calgary “public-private partnership” (P3) continuing-care facility because the private-sector owner had found a way to wring more money from their homes.
At least the company in question, Chartwell Seniors Housing REIT, was refreshingly frank about why they didn’t want to renew Alberta Health Services’ lease on their property at Calgary’s Colonel Belcher facility. “The profitability of that community will probably improve after we make a significant investment and reposition the suites,” a company spokesperson told McClure. “We’ll be able to charge whatever the market can bear.”
So this is what happens when private companies in public health care see opportunities to squeeze more money from their ventures, notwithstanding the allocation of tax dollars to augment their private investment. (We can safely dismiss the original development company’s assertion they took no tax money. After all, who has been paying the rent?) On the other hand, the last crisis of this sort in Calgary, the bankruptcy of the Health Resource Centre private surgery clinic, shows what happens when the opposite occurs, and private “partners” don’t make enough money.
You can expect more of the same, too. As McClure reported in another story yesterday, nursing home owners “predict more ailing elderly could face eviction from subsidized accommodation and a bed shortage for seniors” unless the Alberta government forks over more taxpayer money.
Regardless of all this, back in 2003, Alberta was touting the P3 at the Colonel Belcher Hospital as the greatest thing since sliced toast. Now it’s just one more example of why it’s a horrible idea it is to mix profit-making private companies with health care that belongs in the public sector.
But Mar didn’t even break stride, publishing the following in his health-care policy manifesto yesterday as if the Colonel Belcher story hadn’t happened: “Another way to achieve better ‘aging in place’ options is to implement a new (P3) capital funding model that would provide up to 50 per cent of the total initial capital costs for replacement long-term care beds. … Working closely with the non-profit and private sector to build capital accommodations will go a long way in giving seniors the desired ability to remain in their communities as they age.”
Other aspects of the Mar health plan: Give more control to physicians through the creation of so-called primary care networks (PCNs). Glowingly described on Mar’s website, the fact PCNs are an excellent platform for gradual privatization of health care by stealth seems to have been omitted.
Advocating letting seniors “age in place” — which some would argue is code for letting their families look after them if they can’t afford to put them in expensive private nursing homes — Mar touted the efforts of the old Chinook Health Region to close public facilities and replace them with private care. However, he avoided the term “Chinookification,” used elsewhere to describe this stealthy approach to privatization.
Mar’s ideas are not all bad. There is merit, for example, in expanding medical and nursing schools to make up for the disaster wrought by the government of Ralph Klein, which limited training opportunities for medical professionals and drove many doctors and nurses out of the province, setting the stage for today’s health-care staffing crisis.
Come to think of it, Mar was part of the Klein government, serving it for a while as minister of health, which may be why he didn’t phrase this proposal quite that way.
Strangely, the mainstream media doesn’t yet seem to have provided any analysis of Mar’s health policy. Maybe it’s just too complicated in a week when reporters are busy with important stuff like a visit by a real princess and a human cannonball.
All the more reason for a health policy debate among the would-be Tory leaders, as sought by candidate Alison Redford.
After all, the potential for conflict might attract enough news coverage for a few facts to slip through to voters, who consistently put health care at the top of their worry list.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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