There was another big health care announcement by the Alberta Government Tuesday, the second in as many days, this one about the further deconstruction of Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the shuffling of important health care activities among newly created bureaucracies like a pea under some walnut shells.
Where’s cancer care gone? What about organ transplants and tissue donations?
Well, now they’ll be hiding under the Acute Care Alberta shell, the expensive new bureaucracy created by the United Conservative Party (UCP) that, according to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, will “ensure Albertans receive the high-quality, coordinated care they deserve – delivered when and where they need it most.”
If that phrase sounds familiar, nearly identical words popped up in Monday’s news release and news conference about the UCP’s planned “patient focused” funding scheme for Alberta hospitals, the flaws with which we examined in this space Tuesday.
But despite similar talking points, which will be repeated again and again in the months ahead, there are significant differences between the way the changes announced yesterday were presented and the ones from the day before.
While the fairy tale about better and faster health care services for Albertans was told in both announcements, unlike Monday, Tuesday there was no talk of a grand economic theory behind the changes being plotted.
Instead of being lectured at a news conference and in a high-pressure sales video worthy of a timeshare pitch about how “patient focused funding” imported from the United States (and Australia!) would increase transparency, reduce wait times and bring new surgeons flocking to Alberta with dollar signs in their eyes, there was no justification for yesterday’s announcement beyond rote promises.
As noted here yesterday, the activity-based funding story has been around for years and has been tried and failed in many places, most notably the hot mess immediately to Canada’s south. But it is a fancy market-fundamentalist managerial theory that can be trotted out as a justification, even if it isn’t very likely to work.
The simplest explanation for Tuesday’s bare bones announcement – which was delivered by press release alone without a news conference at which reporters could ask embarrassing questions, even if rationed to two per questioner – is that there simply is no economic or managerial justification that makes sense for transferring cancer care and tissue donations away from AHS.
Indeed, when you parse the words of Tuesday’s press release and think about what it’s saying, the whole idea is nuts!
“Creating specialized focus for cancer care and organ and tissue donation and transplantation will ensure the best care in these key areas that are important for a high-functioning health care system,” says the release. But the obvious fact is that there is already a specialized focus on those areas, and shuffling them into an expensive new bureaucracy that exists for no purpose but to speed the breakup and privatization of AHS makes no sense from the perspective of delivering better health care for Albertans.
“Acute Care Alberta will ensure improved and dedicated access to the best health care possible,” ACA CEO Chris Eagle was quoted saying. Of course, common sense suggests it will do no such thing.
It’s not quite accurate, though, to say there is no economic justification at all for this – although there is none that will benefit Albertans.
It is extremely difficult to see this as anything but an even more aggressive step in the UCP’s ongoing health care privatization project, one of Premier Danielle Smith’s favourite hobbyhorses.
Something that looks very much like the recreation of the Alberta Cancer Board – which was integrated into AHS in 2009 – could have a certain nostalgic appeal, one supposes, if not much utility.
Including tissue donation in the same package smacks of a mechanism to permit and encourage blood and organ sales by Big Pharma, a development that Canadians have been warned against continually but that is beloved by market fundamentalist evangelists.
So if you want to understand these latest changes in Alberta’s health care system, follow the money. This about who is likely to benefit.
Alas, Dear Readers, it is unlikely to be you.
A joke? Mark Carney told a joke? Quelle horreur!
It takes a lot of brass for supporters of political parties like the Conservative Party of Canada and Alberta’s United Conservative Party to get their knickers in a twist about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mild joke about Premier Smith.
These are the guys who took coffee and donuts to the gentlemen with F— Trudeau flags on their trucks, for crying out loud, and they’re going all snowflakey about how Carney chuckled that “we won’t send Danielle Smith” to appear on Fox News?
Oh my gosh! The disrespect! Postmedia political columnist Rick Bell devoted 800 aggrieved words, give or take, to the topic!
Well, I suppose you can’t blame the federal Conservatives for trying to find something, anything, that’ll stick to Carney – so far without much success.
Now, there’s a school of thought that being serious and dad-like is Carney’s brand, and revealing that he has a gentle sense of humour was an unforced error. Could be, I suppose. Perhaps that’s why Carney, adopting his usual serious mien, expressed his respect for the premier in a subsequent media appearance.
But there’s also something to be said for the view of political writer Evan Scrimshaw that in politics “amorphous traits of likability and perceived normalcy are important.” Yup, sometimes they may even help a politician get elected!
And if you actually watch the snippet the Cons are screeching about, Carney came across as both likeable and normal, his joke harmless.
The same cannot be said of federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
