It turns out not everything about Monday’s announcement that the United Conservative Party (UCP) is “making progress refocusing the health care system” was illogical and misleading.
One tidbit about the chaotic restructuring, the point of which has never been coherently explained by any official spokesperson, is that the government is replacing Alberta Health Services’ (AHS) five zones with seven “corridors.”
“Hold Page One!” you may shout sarcastically, but at least this unintentionally acknowledges that under the UCP “hallway medicine” has become the new normal in Alberta’s disintegrating health care system.
Other than that, though, regardless of the cheerful words of the government’s press release about how dismantling AHS will “refocus the health care system to give Albertans the health care system they need,” literally almost everything they are doing is moving the system in the opposite direction.
The few reporters who showed up for the government’s news conference had to dig deep for something that met the traditional definition of news – which, you know, requires their stories to be about something new.
About the best they could do was that the massive restructuring – which is costing a fortune and disrupting an already battered system with no meaningful promise of better future performance – is now months behind schedule.
Health Minister Adrianna LaGrange’s explanation for the delay in setting up a new acute care agency was that “refocusing the health care system is a complex process that needs to be done right.”
Well, I suppose for the reporters it was either that or lead with the fact the new Alberta acute care agency will be called Acute Care Alberta and has a cute new logo, which Health Minister Adriana LaGrange spent a lot of time explaining, reading, by the sound of it, straight from the ad agency’s jargon-filled spiel.
Hey, it’ll “increase awareness so we can all better understand when to use acute care services”! As University of Calgary health law professor Lorian Hardcastle observed in a tweet thread, the best way to do that is actually to make sure everyone has a family doctor.
What Acute Care Alberta is supposed to achieve has never been adequately explained – and wasn’t again by LaGrange. What’s clear between the lines is that it will add another layer of bureaucracy over Alberta Health Services, which will continue to require a significant number of managers to run.
Perhaps Chris Eagle, the former AHS president brought back from the political crypt to act as “special external advisor” to Acute Care Alberta, can explain it one of these days – although he stood solemnly on LaGrange’s left throughout yesterday’s performance without uttering a word that anyone noticed. Maybe he was worried someone would ask him why he quit halfway through his five-year contract back in 2013
According to the press release, Acute Care Alberta will become a legal entity early next year and begin operating, whatever that means in this context, next spring.
Also at the newser, standing similarly silently to LaGrange’s right although looking more cheerful about it, was Primary Care Alberta CEO Kim Simmonds.
Unlike Acute Care Alberta, Primary Care Alberta – which also got a cute new heart-shaped logo – has a real CEO and actually exists as a legal entity. According to the press release, Primary Care Alberta is now “operational.”
Whether that means it actually exists in any more tangible form is not quite so clear. To date, while it has a CEO, it seems to have no offices and very few people know where Dr. Simmonds works. Perhaps she’s still using her old digs at Alberta Health (as the Alberta Heath Department is confusingly branded), where she used to be an assistant deputy minister.
Dr. Simmonds is a PhD epidemiologist, which presumably explains why she’s not the CEO of Acute Care Alberta – since it’s pretty clear Premier Smith wouldn’t tolerate anyone in that job who believes in epidemics. Indeed, part of the reason for this entire gong show is widely understood to be Smith’s revenge on AHS for its public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Does Primary Care Alberta have any employees? Not many now, by all accounts. And who is paying those that it has? AHS, presumably.
As for the new continuing care agency – what do you want to bet it’s called Continuing Care Alberta and has its own cute logo? – it will be run out of the Ministry of Seniors, Community and Social Services, making what it’s up to even more opaque and confusing. Indeed, from there it’ll hardly even be part of the health care system.
LaGrange told reporters yesterday that about 500 management positions have been eliminated at AHS – which, remember, is still an organization with close to 100,000 employees, so just to operate it would require many more managers than that. But how many managers will the other four “pillars” of health care UCP style eventually have? More than 500, I would bet.
Well, we’ll have to wait to see. In the meantime, the government continues to insist what it is creating is “four fully integrated provincial health agencies.”
This begs the obvious question: If they were fully integrated in AHS before, why did they have to be created. Or, to put this another way, who benefits from this restructuring? It’s certainly not Albertans.
As Hardcastle noted in her tweet thread, the UCP has presented no evidence that its new model will improve access. The opposite is more likely.
The whole health care refocusing project has the feel of a bureaucratic Potemkin Village created to fool voters into thinking one thing is happening while in reality something quite different is going on. To wit, a chaotic restructuring intended to make it easier to privatize huge hunks of public health care – as is already happening with the so-called Recovery Alberta agency, which now does have about 10,000 employees, all still paid by their former employer, AHS.
As for the Opposition NDP, it had little to say. “People keep telling me they want a doctor and shorter wait times for specialists,” Health Critic Sarah Hoffman said on a couple of social media platforms, “but the UCP just announced a new logo and CEO.”
This is clever, but a more serious critique is essential.
UCP has plan to lower auto insurance cost by raising it
The CBC has revealed the UCP’s plan to lower Albertans’ auto insurance premiums, which are the highest in the land.
Turns out they’ll lift the cap on insurance rates and take away the right of Albertans who are injured to sue for damages.
Notwithstanding the many words devoted to the subject, that’s all you actually need to know.
We’ll see the press release later this week.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
