There’s not much need for scare tactics by supporters of public medicare: Yesterday the Wildrose Party laid out a pretty clear plan for privatizing health care in Alberta.
Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith’s news release touting the idea of a “wait-time guarantee” for medically necessary treatments and procedures is heavy on glittering promises (“Alberta families will have peace of mind”) and short on technical details, but it boils down to a three-part plan for privatization:
1) Starve the public system of funds.
2) Pump public money into for-profit private health care corporations.
3) Watch a two-tier private system quickly flower as the public sector withers.
It’s not a big step from administering public health care in two tiers — a neglected public system and a pampered private sector — to an honest-to-gosh two-tier system in which extra payments get you timely care in a private clinic and lack of cash lets you wait longer and suffer more.
The Wildrose news release claims “we all know from experience” putting more money into health care won’t work. (This statement is false enough on its face to warrant a Wildrose-style “clarification,” perhaps in the form of a “bullying press release.”)
Anyway, how would we Albertans know? After all, at least from the time Peter Lougheed left office until Premier Alison Redford came along, Alberta’s long-governing Progressive Conservative party has been playing pretty much the same game of starving key parts of the system for funds in hopes of creating public support for private “solutions.” And the jury’s still out on what Redford would be doing were her party not facing an existential crisis thanks to her apparently incompetent re-election strategy.
The only thing is that, up to now at least, the PCs have made a practice of bowing to public pressure to maintain the public health care system whenever voters cottoned on to what they were up to. It’s not so clear what a Wildrose government of hard-right market fundamentalists and raw-meat social conservatives would do if faced by a public backlash.
It is true that, approached this way, the fixes do tend to cost more than a steady-as-it-goes commitment to public health care — but that’s all grist for the market-fundamentalist mill from either the PC or Wildrose perspective, which in recent years has been pretty much the same.
This is why Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason got it right yesterday when he observed at a news conference that at least the Wildrose position has the merit of being closer to saying what they mean. “The Conservatives have no credibility left when it comes to emergency-room health care,” he said. “Danielle Smith and the Wildrose are at least honest in saying they want American-style health care.”
Stripped of its glitter words like “patient choice” — you know, rich patients can choose better care than poor patients — the Wildrose strategy is designed to cause a precipitous decline of service in the more efficient and less costly public sector that will drive frightened patients to the private health-care corporations a Wildrose government would feed and water with taxpayers’ dollars.
Justifying the spending on the private sector is where the “access guarantee” comes in — if the public system fails, which it will be set up to do because we all know money is’t “the answer,” the subsidy to private operators will be required by law. The inevitable result will be higher costs system-wide, plus declining service and longer waits in the public system.
With that strategy in operation, it won’t take long for a two-tier medical system to emerge, notwithstanding the Wildrose Party’s meaningless promise that Albertans won’t be required “to take out their credit card or cheque book to pay for medically necessary services.”
As the private sector eats up a larger share of taxpayers’ dollars — the result of the new American-style private sector’s need to pay the cost of competition and shareholders’ demand for dividends — the cost to the government will also grow. Then watch what happens to a Wildrose government’s definition of “medically necessary.”
Pain? It won’t kill you, Buster! If you want it fixed, go to a private clinic — you’ve got “choice” now!
So say hello to another conservative buzzword: “de-listing.”
The de-listing moment will come when a Wildrose government would start to push us toward its other solution to our health care woes: expensive and unreliable private insurance, complete with unaffordable deductibles, large “co-payments” and denial of treatment to people with “pre-existing conditions.” Oh yeah, and “choice.”
But no matter how bad these ideas are, never underestimate the effectiveness of corporate lobbying and election campaign donations by private-sector companies that want something from right-wing governments — in this case to lead us down the garden path to the right’s dream of U.S.-style health care.
It’s a scary aspect of the Wildrose Party’s confidence at this point in the election campaign that it is prepared to publish a clear blueprint for replacing our public health care system with a system based on for-profit corporate health care, and then blandly promise us that no one will have to pay, no one will have to wait and everything will be better.
The fact that right in their news release they blow off anyone who disagrees with their plan as a “special interest group” ought to give us a hint of how they intend to go about privatizing and breaking up our health care system once they are in office.
If we buy this bill of goods, as a hell of a lot of Albertans seem to be doing, a good case can be made that we deserve what we get — including the justified rage of other Canadians who will be forced through NAFTA and the shifty co-operation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s neo-Con government to adopt the same expensive and destructive “reforms.”
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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