Private health care in Alta. is harming the public system – new report ; The expansion of private health care in Alberta has lead to longer wait times in the public system and fewer surgeries overall.
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Private health care in Alta. is harming the public system – new report ; The expansion of private health care in Alberta has lead to longer wait times in the public system and fewer surgeries overall.
41 replies on “Private health care in Alta. is harming the public system – new report ; The expansion of private health care in Alberta has lead to longer wait times in the public system and fewer surgeries overall.”
I-am-ever-so-shocked
The white collar criminal running Ontario is dragging us into the same pit.
It’s not the private healthcare. It’s the government not letting immigrants doctors get accreditation easily.
Rabble.ca lol.
Totally, *definitely* not a biased source.
Next you’ll be telling me privatization helps a handful of private citizens and not the public.
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Ya but the conservatives have gathered a lot of $$$ for their political campaign but it’s just a coincidence.
Of course. If nothing else, profit needs to be extracted so resources will simply not go as far, all other things being equal.
But things are not equal. So in an effort to maximize profits, as is the duty of any business to it’s shareholders, some combination of the following will occur:
Service will be reduced.
Profitable cases will be cherry picked. Complicated cases will be pushed back to the public sector.
Public sector workers will be pulled to staff private clinics.
“in 2020, the UCP government allocated $400 million for medical procedures in private sector entities”
This is not true private sector healthcare. If you want a free market in healthcare, the government provides $0.
We have a free market for things like microwaves and coffee tables. The government isn’t involved at all. There’s lots of choices at different price points and there aren’t any shortages.
What they did was just another variation of socialized medicine.
I wounder what excuse they will use for every other province with out private health care and their increased wait times and closing of hospitals
That is why u need the NDP to be elected to fix the problem. Conservatives are bad for health care
My dads hip surgery was fast tracked. He got it done at a private clinic that the government pays for.
If only there were other countries that implemented private healthcare that we could compare against the vast majority of the world that implements public healthcare.
Maybe we wouldn’t have to experiment with it and cause so much harm to our public institutions!
Sigh.
So biased. Study was done during covid era when tons of surgeries were cancelled. Wouldn’t make sense to do the study post covid either when there is a ton of surgeries backlogged.
“rabble.ca is an alternative, left-leaning English-language Canadian online magazine.”
Enough said… propaganda trying to misinform right before the election
Two things to consider with this news.
The first is that it comes from the Parkland Institute. They’re kind of like a progressive version of the Manning Centre or Fraser Institute. The information they are providing is accurate, but it’s very skewed.
The initiative came into play just before COVID and then COVID hit. They are saying that surgeries in Alberta shrank by 30%, but [the national average was a 32% reduction in surgeries](https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canadians-still-waiting-significantly-longer-for-surgeries-than-before-pandemic-report-1.6325176).
If the Province of Alberta (and all other provinces for that matter) used 100% of their surgical capacity during COVID, we’d be reading a Parkland Institute on “Needless Deaths Caused by Poor Allocation of Resources to COVID.”
Shocking.
I don’t understand how anybody could possibly think a for -profit system when produce better outcomes. The point of a for-profit system is to make money. It is not to make people healthy, it is not to provide top quality service, and it is not to do it cheaply.
It is to make money.
There are definitely issues in the public system. The biggest issues are the increasing bloat of administration, which does need to be addressed but it’s not removed in the private sector because a lot of the administration has to do with government regulation and increasing oversight, which is good in certain ways but has in many ways gotten excessive.
The second problem with the public system is chronic underfunding. Conservative governments are basically now saying the public system doesn’t work so we need to private system. And of course one of the reasons the public system doesn’t work is because conservative governments have been chronically struggling to pull money out of the public system or in other ways caused it to fail.
You stop paying into the system, the system doesn’t work anymore, the system is broken we need private health care!
But there is no reasonable way in which private healthcare is going to provide better service for less money. And there was only so much health care capacity to go around, so the increase in private health care can only occur at the decrease in public health care, unless we magically produce a whole bunch of extra doctors and nurses and related.
Nobody uses “Alta” as an abbreviation , wtf
Shocker
As we said it would. As it has in every other jurisdiction
Clearly the solution is to privatize it all, lol.
Here is what will happen with the introduction of private medicine:
1. Overall access will increase
(as the supply of medical services will no longer be limited by government funding)
2. Overall cost will increase
(First, there will be competition between public and private providers for physicians and other medical professionals. Secondly, multiplication of administrative systems will increase costs).
3. Equity will decrease
(The public section will be progressively more underfunded, and be forced to disproportionately absorb higher-complexity patients, leading to declining quality of care for those unable to afford private).
4. Over time, private medicine will progressively displace public
(As the quality of service in the public section deteriorates, not only the rich, but also the middle class will opt into the private section for better-quality medicine, reinforcing the process ad infinitum).
5. Public medicine will focus on the basics, and stop providing “state-of-the-art” and technology-intensive options.
(Forget MRI’s and newly discovered cancer therapies, but the poor will easily be able to see an underpaid provider for basic medicine like antibiotics, older diabetes and blood pressure medications, etc.)
We don’t have the government we want, we have the government we all deserve. Honestly it’s fucking hilarious. 38 million Canadians and 98% of you keep getting dry-dogged by a handful of politicians. No wonder they’re getting more and more brazen about it, they must be rofl. “Hey check what I did this time guys! And they’re still gonna keep voting for either me or the other guy doing the same thing for decades lmao!”
Like how bad does it really need to get before you all go hey.. hold up, let’s try this other party! Nah, you’ll just go “yeah but NDP blah blah blah” and just keep repeatedly putting your hand on the hot stove and going “ow” and complaining that it’s hot. You’re already thinking of saying something just like that right now. Every single democracy in the world does this stupid dance, it’s astounding how stupid we are and they all know it. You could literally be drowning and about to die and notice a 3rd option is throwing you a lifebuoy and you’ll bat it away with your hand and die instead lol.
Carry on with your “Get the libs/cons at ALL costs” game though. I’m sure they’re even more amused by it than I am.
FYI from the actual report. Looks like public declined more than what private made up for. They tried increasing private surgeries from 15% to 30% starting in 2019.
The number of surgeries performed in CSFs
increased from 29,052 in 2018-2019 to 43,078 in 2021-2022 (or 48 per
cent), while public hospital volumes declined from 256,893 to 225,257
(or 12 per cent).
Quite a bold claim to blame private when it’s the public sector that flopped harder. The report blames private sector for taking away a finite pool of healthcare professionals
Ontario health coalition is holding a referendum for this shit against dofo.
Idk if this is allowed but it’s the 26/27 this month.
https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/event-ontario-referendum-to-stop-ford-governments-privatization-of-our-hospitals-announced/
Go vote.
Political leaders love selling our tax dollars to lobbyists to give us less and cost us more.
Wow who could’ve predicted that
Feds need to stop this bullshit, and YESTERDAY.
Conservatives hate people and just want their corporate overlords to make even more money.
When we did this in Sask, it was super effective at reducing wait lists and we went from longest to shortest wait times for those targeted ortho procedures. So YMMV.
Where is the line for shock and utter disbelief?
costs more money and provides less service.
*”“Between 2018-2019 and 2021-2022, surgical volumes in [private] chartered surgical facilities increased by 48 per cent while surgical activity in public hospitals declined by 12 per cent.” (Note that the public sector is much bigger than the private, so the decline in public sector activity, in absolute figures, is far greater than the increase in the private sector.)”*
Since most people only read the editorialized headline.
Anyone with two brain cells could tell you this. You needn’t look any further than our fascist neighbour’s to the south
My Alberta family says,”people with money should be able to que jump.”
I don’t know what to say.
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Albertans can get private healthcare within their province? Uhhhh,… don’t think so.
I’ve learned that within a conservative mind lies no interest in facts. Especially when you can point just south of us to demonstrate the human toll privatization has on a basic human right like healthcare.
They’re more concern about doing it just because they “Feel” its the best choice. There’s absolutely nothing more complex to the mindset. They feel as if they’re “losing to the other side” if they don’t get what they want. They want to upend a marvelous success that Canada has, just to make it be more like America.
Well. This is exactly what the people of Alberta want. Otherwise, Danielle Smith would have zero chance of being elected.
Public healthcare might be free, but it’s wildly inefficient. More people are willing to pay to get treatment sooner, and medical professionals are seeing the opportunity. Paired with runaway inflation and housing costs, can you blame them?