A dangerously misleading statement appeared in an op-ed story under Health Minister Adriana LaGrange’s byline Thursday in the Calgary Herald. To wit, “that Alberta Health Services has evolved beyond its original acute-care hospital system mandate.”
Everyone makes mistakes and most politicians spin the facts their way.
But this statement, which has been heard before from Premier Danielle Smith, is so obviously at odds with the facts about the creation of Alberta’s province-wide public health agency in 2009, and so easy to refute with solid documentary evidence, that it suggests something more sinister than mere error or spin.
Even the authors of government press releases, after all, normally check the facts before they publish.
And even though the op-ed was plainly not written by Ms. LaGrange herself – such bylines are a small fiction perpetrated by public relations departments and permitted by a certain moribund U.S.-owned newspaper chain desperately on the hunt for free copy that doesn’t require much editing – as health minister she has some responsibility ensure the general accuracy of what is being attributed to her.
So if it turns out this was a case of out-of-control spin or an honest mistake, at least, the claim needs to be publicly retracted. We will watch and wait, but not hopefully.
So what are the facts about the establishment of Alberta Health Services in 2008 and 2009 by the Progressive Conservative government led by premier Ed Stelmach?
We need to start with the legislation through which Alberta’s original 17 health regions were created by the government of Ralph Klein, Alberta’s Progressive Conservative premier from 1992 to 2006, the Regional Health Authorities Act of 2000.
Section 5 of that law states that the health authorities exist to promote and protect the health of the population in each region, allocate resources appropriately, ensure reasonable access to health care is provided throughout the region, and provide “health services in a manner that is responsive to the needs of individuals and communities and supports the integration of services and facilities in the health region.”
This matters because the Regional Health Authorities Act is still the statute that governs Alberta Health Services.
When the regional health authorities were created, in addition to hospitals, all health units and nursing home districts were dissolved and moved into the RHAs.
In 2003, the Klein Government cut the number of regions from 17 to nine.
On May 15, 2008, frustrated with the independence of the Calgary Health Region’s powerful president and CEO, premier Stelmach and his health minister Ron Liepert rolled the remaining health regions into a single province-wide entity to provide a wide range of health care services to Albertans in and out of hospitals.
But while significant, neither of these changes required amendments to the Regional Health Authorities Act.
In addition to the troublesome Calgary Health Region, Mr. Liepert’s plan eliminated the Aspen, Capital (Edmonton and area, that is), Chinook, David Thompson, Northern Lights, Palliser, and Peace Country health regions.
Only the East Central Health Region remained, effectively becoming Alberta Health Services without debate in the Legislature. Importantly, though, Section 5 did not change – the sole health region’s broad mandate remained untouched.
The details of this administrative sleight of hand were missed or ignored by journalists at the time and are all but lost to history now.
The day after the ministerial order, journalist Jason Markusoff, writing in the Calgary Herald, quoted Mr. Liepert saying that “the past governance structure would not guarantee that we can get to the next level of ensuring equitable, basic health care throughout Alberta.”
“MLAs have brought to me instances of where one side of the road in one of the regions delivers services different from people who live on the other side of the road,” Mr. Liepert continued. (In 2008, at least, this was considered to be a bad thing. Apparently this is no longer true in 2023!)
As if to confirm that AHS’s mandate was all-encompassing, the Health Governance Transition Act took effect on April 1, 2009, dissolving the Alberta Mental Health Board, Alberta Cancer Board, and Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission – all province-wide health care agencies that operated in a variety of venues – and rolled them directly into AHS. Health services in provincial jails also became an AHS responsibility.
Alberta Health Services became a legal entity in its own right the same day, April 1, 2009.
Later, provincial ambulance services and ambulance dispatch services were integrated into the system, but that hardly amounts to the evolving mandate for AHS that Ms. LaGrange’s op-ed describes. Rather, it was merely confirmation of the existing one.
So we can see that right from the get-go, even before AHS technically existed, its mandate, in Ms. LaGrange’s words, was to be “a comprehensive health organization that serves Albertans across various settings, from hospitals to clinics, continuing-care facilities, and beyond.” This was to include mental health, inmate health, cancer treatment, substance abuse treatment, community health and so on. Not just acute care hospitals.
So why does this matter?
It matters because, despite the controversies in 2008 and 2009 associated with the creation of AHS, it is unusual among the major policies implemented by Conservative Alberta governments since Peter Lougheed stepped aside as premier in 1985 in that by and large it has been a success!
Researchers from the respected Canadian Institute of Health Information have reported that AHS has the lowest administrative costs for provincial health care in Canada – 3.3 per cent of total spending, compared with a national average of 4.5 per cent.
Moreover, during the pandemic, AHS’s province-wide structure co-ordinated the discharge and care of patients, eased use of hospital capacity across the province, made management of surgeries more effective, and gave Alberta a huge advantage in purchasing personal protective equipment during a worldwide shortage.
It also matters because, as is universally acknowledged, health care is in crisis throughout North America and the world – beset by an international shortage of medical professionals, surging rates of drug addiction, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stability and focus on the obvious problems facing health care everywhere are what the doctor should be ordering, not a vanity restructuring to satisfy Premier Smith’s anti-vaccine base in the United Conservative Party and her well-established ideological opposition to public services!
But the most powerful reason for concern is that a government strongly committed to as much health care privatization as politically possible as quickly as possible cannot be trusted not to privatize vast swaths of the health care system outside acute care hospitals if they are conveniently hived off into separate silos.
This would be a disaster for everyone except the multinational for-profit corporations salivating to fill gaps abandoned by the province and the retired politicians invited to sit on their boards.
It is not comforting in the least to know that, despite her carefully orchestrated change of tune lately, Ms. Smith is a market fundamentalist ideologue who has spent her entire adult life advocating U.S.-style for-profit health care in Canada despite unending evidence of its catastrophic effect.
Can this leopard change her spots? I think we all know the answer to that one.
I suspect that the coming bozo blow-ups from Adriana LaGrange will be epidemic, but her position is quite safe.
Sleepy LaGrange has a proven record of being very compliant to whatever agenda she is expected to promote. And she will promote it, no matter how much she is called out for how stupid the policy or the statement. She is that much of a traffic cone.
So, Albertan can count on a lot of idiocy in public health care in the months to come, because they voted for it.
To dismiss this as “stupid” is stupid. You miss the point of it.
So what is the point then, David? Please enlighten us
If you can’t see what is happening to public health care in Alberta and the rest of Canada and how this announcement is doing just that, there is no helping you. It’s no wonder our public health care system is falling apart with people like yourself, who dismiss anything they don’t like as “stupid”. The people doing this are misleading but not stupid. Heaven help us.
There’s nothing like a leopard for eating people’s faces.
They assured me they wouldn’t eat my face if I voted for them.
That is because when “Help Is On the Way” is translated from UCP political PR spin peekaboo bafflegab, it really means (as already noted by the blog host):
“a government strongly committed to as much health care privatization as politically possible as quickly as possible” brought to you by “a market fundamentalist ideologue who has spent her entire adult life advocating U.S.-style for-profit health care in Canada”
“Help is on the way” is a term used heavily by Q-conspiracy theorists in their forums prior to the Donald becoming president and beyond. It probably triggers something in those sorts. For me it is code for looming disaster.
UCP Disaster Capitalism Inc., LLC
di•sas•ter cap•i•tal•ism
noun
1. the exploitation of a sudden crisis for private profit
The ‘committed’, enthusiastic talk show host/corporate lobbyist has, with out a doubt, already been told to do the job and has dutifully absorbed all of the necessary ideological indoctrination at the various re-education camps (Calgary School, Fraser Institute, ect.), where; she was most probably informed that:
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
and it probably did not even require a Don Logan style ‘attitude readjustment’
Thanks David for repeatedly speaking truth to power and truth to Albertans.
DJC: splendid analysis, Sir, as usual. I might quibble a bit with now “successful” the formation of AHS has been, since there was a good deal of turmoil in the organization for years after its formation.
There was a period from 2008 up until about 2015 when there was so much turnover in top-level leadership, the CEO’s office should have had a revolving door & the name plate replaced with an erasable whiteboard. The Board of AHS was fired once before, in a kerfuffle over Board decisions about senior executive compensation, that belied the notion that the Board of AHS operated at “arms’-length” from the Government of the day.
It is also a fact that when Ron Leipert scribbled on a cocktail napkin in 2008, it was to solve problems with the Regional Health Authorities that could have been fixed just as easily without blowing the whole system up. For example, he could have directed RHAs to collaborate better on matters such as procurement and payroll management, in order to reduce duplication of costs, without the need to forcibly merge them.
All of that said, now that we have AHS, warts and all, the system needs stability more than it needs upheaval. Want to blow something up? Dissolve Covenant Health and put AHS in charge of its hospitals and continuing care centres.
Thanks, Jerry. This is a fair point about the turmoil that bedeviled AHS for a long time after its creation. One of the best things that happened to AHS was the appointment of Verna Yiu as president and CEO of AHS. So of course that little gobshite Kenney fired her and, if he hadn’t, Danielle Smith would have. Pardon my bad language. DJC
My husband and I worked for AHS through this turmoil. We were both HCP but in entirely different rolls. Verna Yiu brought stability quickly and for the most part compassionately. Because she was committed to public healthcare she was turfed. The comments about Calgary are true to this day and the Calgary area/region is a source of a great deal of corruption in AHS. I now understand where this came from.
Great article
The word “crisis” seems to have gone “off-label” of late: is it literally true that “health care is in crisis throughout North America and the world”? “Crisis” implies a critical situation where if something isn’t done about it, something will happen—usually bad but not always as, say, a high fever which breaks at the critical point between living and dying is a good thing. But something has to change. If it doesn’t, then the continued use of the term becomes “off-label” or rhetorical.
Case in point: when illegally-made fentanyl first hit the illicit street-drug market and users suddenly started dying from overdoses, the situation had reached a critical point where if something wasn’t done, something would change, in this case something bad. And, indeed, something did change for the worse: in BC (where I live), several overdose deaths occur on an average day, an everyday tragedy which doesn’t change anymore. It isn’t a crisis anymore, it’s the status quo. (Given the pool of affected users isn’t diminishing by attrition, “epidemic” might be the better word—the scourge appears to be continually spreading to new victims.)
In some parlance, “crisis” may be used to forewarn of an approaching critical point—used off-label, that is. This kind of rhetoric was used politically with respect healthcare, for example in Saskatchewan when Premier Tommy Douglas implemented the continent’s first universal public healthcare system: dissenting doctors claimed it was a crisis, that something bad would happen if it wasn’t stopped. They were only partly right: something did happen, but it turned out not as bad as they warned—in fact, so not-bad that the model was eventually adopted federally.
But “crisis” was used again in its rhetorical, forewarning sense, decades later when conservative parties bemoaned the increasing cost of public healthcare which, they claimed, was unsustainable. In fact the claim depended on projecting the sudden aging of Baby-Boomers as if it wouldn’t peak and decline as this huge demographic (four-fold larger than its predecessor) moved through the most expensive part of healthcare, infirmities of old age and morbidity—that is, statistical abuse typical of politically partisan rhetoric.
The first Boomers are now 78 years old, meaning the Boomer bulge is nearing its peak (average Canadian lifespan is about 81 years) and our relatively geriatric profile will flatten for the next 15 to 20 years. Perhaps because so many Canadian seniors who vote prefer not to hear that the healthcare system most of them depend on is about to reach a critical point and soon buckle, politicians have stopped making the case that we can’t afford its rising costs.
(Incidentally, this particular statistical abuse was availed in 2016 by physicians’ colleges in order to raise false alarm about the four-fold increase of opioid prescription which in reality was, taking into account Boomers moving into old age when pain increasingly needs to be treated, to be demographically expected. Colleges imposed a crackdown on opioid prescription by creating a false narrative that opioid prescription was related to—indeed, causative of—the illegally-made fentanyl overdose crisis. A “crisis,” that is, when it actually was, for a short while, at a critical point where, if something wasn’t done, bad things would happen: the crackdown —BC Colleges were eventually forced by the government to rescind it— didn’t work at all, but bad things did happen: a new and deadly status quo had arrived.
Healthcare the world over reached a critical point when Covid hit. It was a crisis: if something wasn’t done, bad things would happen. And, initially, they did happen—the whole world over: unpreparedness was exposed by people dying, and more people died where health authorities played down the danger. But this critical point was passed, things were done, change happened: safety protocols, vaccine development and mass inoculation, and a gradual, three-year return to normal—with lessons learned: masks, hand-sanitizing, and coincidental reduction of all types respiratory contagion. The Covid crisis really only lasted for a few months and the following epidemic of uncooperativeness and denial became a short lived status quo in most places—but one with politically partisan residues.
The pandemic exacerbated a longstanding trend of doctor and nurse shortages which could be largely attributed to inadequate preparation for Baby-Boom geriatrics (indeed, the lion’s share of Covid deaths was among people over 80 years of age). But a crisis means something’s gonna happen if nothing’s done. In medical personnel terms, it already has: long waits, a dearth of GPs and nurses—feeling like a new status quo. But in most places in Canada there’s recruitment and diversification of medical expertise that now includes nurse practitioners and pathways for foreign medical practitioners to transition into the Canadian system. Something did happen, so how are we still in crisis?
It depends what part of the world one is talking about. Is the healthcare system in India or the USA anymore inadequate and challenged than it ever was before the pandemic? Did Covid make things change there? Even here in Canada the opioid epidemic, Covid, and the shortage of medical personnel is used as a partisan political football. But wasn’t it always thus? At what point does the situation reach critical?
BC and Alberta contrast demographically, the former getting more geriatric, the latter maintaining a much younger profile. Yet in BC where, granted, bad things did happen after the critical point of Covid, the doctor shortage is starting to recover (albeit slowly) while wait-times remain stubbornly long, but still shortening, nonetheless. That is, good things also happened after that critical point of realizing, thanks to Covid, that the system needs an overhaul to bring it back up to speed.
Alberta, in stark contrast, was hurt much more by Covid because of politically partisan interference with ordinary epidemiology. Drug overdoses, and doctor and nurse shortages were much more exacerbated by Covid because of UCP government policy. Yet even a change of leader and premier has not diminished the UCP’s thirst for privatization which, as noted above, is proven to be more expensive, less effective, and wholly unfair.
But is this a “crisis”? In the forewarning sense, definitely. Then when will the critical point come when something isn’t done about it, something will change? Or has it already passed? Even to ask the question—which, I guess, one can’t do without recognizing that Albertans re-elected the UCP to a second term—is to suggest that the province itself —by itself—is either approaching a critical point or might actually be in a healthcare crisis already. The question is whether or how much bad things will happen.
But, despite everything I’ve experienced here in BC (several different GPs since 2020, long waits), I can’t see BC in healthcare crisis—that is, something bad’s gonna happen if something isn’t done. True: things have changed (less doctors, more waits than before Covid), but the bad things that happened have been addressed and action on getting more doctors, shortening waits, improving elders care, &c.
I use the term “crisis” advisedly, but recognize that Alberta just might be one a them places where it’s applicable.
I can’t speak for North America, but the rural BC hospital I used to work in is absolutely in crisis. I burned out hard and won’t go back, even knowing that vulnerable members of my community, people I have known my whole life, are getting inferior health care due to my absence – having experienced both, I’d rather have broken ribs than burnout. Destroying part of myself to be a bucket under a leak in a roof no one was trying to fix then being discarded when I was no longer able to serve that purpose changed me, morally, and changed how I relate to society and what I’m willing to give to society, and I’m still sorting that out. There aren’t enough doctors, nurses, lab techs, ultrasound techs, housekeepers, cooks, or paper pushers. There is no shortage of people willing to loudly complain, but when we ask for help all we hear are crickets. The people at the top seem to believe eating their staff to get through one more day is their only option, and, to be fair, they get paid the same no matter how bad of a job they do. The people doing the work aren’t allowed to implement the changes they think will fix the problems, and, to be fair, health care is very high stakes, if you deviate from established procedures and something goes wrong you have medicolegal liability – by contrast, if you follow established procedures and something goes wrong you are free and clear. The people doing the actual work wake up tired and go to bed exhausted. You know how people who cook for a living get home and don’t want to cook anymore, even for themselves? Imagine going to work and caring all day then coming home and being unable to care about anything, even yourself. Imagine your life slowly disintegrating over the course of years so that you can delay the inevitable consequences for a society that knows exactly what is happening but refuses to take action to address the problems. There is no sense that anything will change, except for the worse. There are fewer doctor’s appointments available, there are services that are no longer available, and the ER has closed several times – and things are in many ways better there than in other hospitals!
You are right about the ultimate causes, but I disagree in the strongest terms possible with the implication that bad things won’t happen if we keep going on as we are. For those who aren’t personally suffering as a result – yet – it’s because it’s always the poor and non-white who suffer first and worst. Bad things have already happened, and they’re going to get worse. The damage is below the waterline.
Neil, my heart breaks for you and all the other health care workers, who are in the same boat. I get very angry that the people that were elected to supposedly represent us, would use the pandemic to score political points. I would still like to know who* was behind the ads across Canada saying how bad things were in the health system. To me it was the most “anti-recruitment” thing possible. Instead of bringing people in, it was telling potential staff: look how horrible the conditions are, do you want to work in this profession?
Only what I call the ‘old souls’, the ones who still have belief in humanity and have kept their positive attitude going, in spite of the ungrateful, selfish, narcissists, are still applying. You have to have strong moral fiber to get into the profession that is being consistently attacked, especially by the very people who are supposed to be helping to make things better, not worse.
There is no gratitude for the people that are willing to look after us when we need help. The premise seems to be that since you “volunteered ” to do the job, you shouldn’t have to be paid adequately, never mind appropriately. Yet these same people will be the first ones hollering into the microphone if they are in need.
I believe that the biggest loss in our society is compassion for each other. It’s not all gone yet, inspite of how hard they try.
If nothing else, know that you are not alone and not forgotten,
There is a quote, in the frontispiece of Michael Crichton’s novel, ‘The Andromeda Strain’, that reads something like, “a crisis arises when a previously tolerable set of circumstances becomes, through the addition of an additional factor, suddenly intolerable” — or words to that effect (I’m not at home right now, so I can’t go down to my bookshelf & look it up to be sure of the precise wording).
One might argue that the long-running epidemic of opioid addiction & overdose was tolerable for decades, at least when measured by the unwillingness of society to do anything effective about it. It was the adulteration of street drugs with powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl & carfentanil — initially developed for use in surgical anesthesia and the intensive care unit — that was the additional factor that rendered the pre-existing set of circumstances intolerable. They remain so. The fact that it has not abated does not mean it’s no longer a crisis — if that were true, climate change would also no longer qualify as a crisis.
So the problem, fifty years into the neoliberal assault on democracy and the post-war welfare state in the US imperium, is a change in the constitution of the drugs? Who knew?
“Hey, wine!”
Well, here we go. Welcome to Republican politics, where “truth” is a matter of convenience and “democracy” is a code word for “heads I win, tails you lose.”
Why is it that Conservatives and (especially!) Republicans claim that “businesses can do no wrong, and governments can do no right”? Is it because, as soon as they form a government both Cons and Reps do their damndest to PROVE they can’t do anything right?
It’s ironic beyond belief that Alberta Health Services should be a successful outcome of a turf battle between two alpha males. One arrogant uber-boss appointed the other; when the fight started, guess who lost? The accidental result was the most efficient public health-care service in Canada.
Lesson without words for Rachel Notley (or her successor): you don’t need to pass new legislation every time. Ron Liepert used existing regulations to reduce regional health boards from nine to one. I wonder how many regulations are on the books that, properly enforced, could solve a lot of Alberta’s abandoned-well and carbon pollution problems.
Bureaucratic footnote: if AHS did indeed better manage health care resources during the Covid-19 crisis than other provincial health agencies—imagine how well they could have done if Jason Kenney and the rural rubes who hated masks had left them alone to do their jobs.
“…if AHS did indeed better manage health care resources during the Covid-19 crisis than other provincial health agencies”. In fact, COVID-19 was actually AHS’ second pandemic. The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic was its first, and it was still a nascent organization when that all went down: it did not become a legal entity until April 1st of 2009, about a year after Minister Leipert’s cocktail napkin musings, & rollout of the mass H1N1 immunization clinics through AHS public health clinics was that fall. As a Registered Nurse, I was reassigned from my regular duties in cardiac rehabilitation to augment staff in one of those clinics, & spent a few weeks giving a wide variety of northwestern Albertans their shots. While there were a few glitches — alleged queue-jumping by Calgary Flames players among them — all in all it went fairly well. That crisis was far briefer, with fewer long-term consequences, than SARS-CoV2, although there were more fatalities from pH1N1(2009) amongst younger, healthier adults than we usually see with seasonal influenza.
One of the issues with COVID immunization was the overt politicization of mass immunization clinics, which the Kenneyites decided to micromanage rather than allow AHS’ institutional memory to organize them. To be fair, though, Alberta wasn’t unique in this.
*sigh* Darned autocorrect — jumped in to change a word just as I was hitting ‘Post comment’. In the final sentence of my first paragraph, ‘authority’ was meant to be ‘although’, which makes much more sense.
Jerry: It’s been fixed. DJC
Thank you, Sir 🙂
Thanks for pointing this out. It sounds like they are revising not only history, but the facts in the legislation as a way of positioning for the coming privatization. Then, they’ll revise the legislation as part of the decentralization and slip this new mandate in quietly. People will have heard the existing mandate described like this already and they’re counting on us to never read the actual Act.
JE: This is an important point. They can change the number of health regions by ministerial order – in other words, effectively at will. They cannot, however, change the mandates of the health regions without changing the legislation. They have a majority, so that can be done, but not without a fight in the Legislature and a lot of publicity, including possibly some sanctions from the federal government under the Canada Health Act. We depend, of course, on the people of the rest of Canada to ensure this remains the case, because there is no ideological light at all between the UCP and the post-Harper We also depend on the NDP Opposition to do its job properly in the event legislation is brought forward. DJC
Would this be considered speaking imprecisely again? The UCP circus continues.
It is a puzzler that the UCP are even bothering to push the chimera that the mandate of the AHS is acute care. Why pretend? The majority of citizens in this province have already been convinced that what is good for the rich is good for everybody and what is good for everybody is bad for the economy.
I wonder if the rest of Canada will say, we made our bed, lay in it.
If Health services is only responsible for hospitals, that ought to be fun, once doctors become corporations and operate the way American doctors do. No money, no care by doctors, but if hospitals are still there and are a government responsibility you can conclude where all sick people who can’t afford doctors will be.
As we have seen through out history, crisis are sometimes created so politicians/corporations can go ahead with plans voters would never have agreed to.
The game Smith wants to implement is simply a way for her to transfer a lot of money from the public to the doctors. She will then most likely have a much bigger war chest to go into the next election.
Before people think Smith’s idea is a good one, please remember that the mortality rate for women after giving birth in the U.S.A. doubled between 2009 and 2019. During COVID, some hospitals in Texas simply closed their doors, they weren’t making enough money because they were unable to perform surgeries. American style health care is only good for the very rich and most /albertans aren’t of the very rich.
Its all about the money not about health care for the children of Alberta. They don’t vote.
IMPO, given SHarpers secret deal with China, ie:FIPA , Jkenney’s deal with the Saudis (June 1-2021 article)* , and his changing restrictions for crypto mining– CClark’s deal/ Cite C; to name a few that I’m aware of, Danielle ‘s plans for health care in Alberta will be put through….as the old saying goes, “by hook or by crook”. If there is too much public interest and or opposition, she will find a way to use her ‘majority mandate’ the same way she did for the conflict of interest. Her precise language was that the voters have spoken; I think therefore I am and I will .The means will justify the end results, at least in her logic. Whether it’s bad for most Albertans is a moot point; again she told us “once Albertans get used to paying out of pocket ” , no matter what the reaction to the good Dr Talbot Jones that DS has presented.
(If i was of a skeptical nature, I would almost think that this is of a personal conflict, but am bemused by whom it could possibly be between.)
Besides, look, a great distraction, those darned port workers are at it again; more fuel for both DS & PP to rage about with Skippy now after Seamus’s job . A perfect time to slide in some new rules.
Has anyone else noticed how completely quiet the ‘Freedom crowd ‘ has been over DS and all her “mandate ” letters, nada, nothing, just crickets!!
But then I’m not signed up, so I’m not privileged to read the “Xeets”—- courtesy of DS
Extra, extra read all about it??
“hook or by crook”? Well, here you go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CEMQl3wh74
Hey, here’s a thought. Has anybody who knows what AHS does bothered to reply to LaGrange’s PostMedia (rhymes with post-truth) op-ed?
The problem that confronts both the Alberta Ministry of Health along with the government department it created called Alberta Health, and the potemkin arms length provincial corporation called “Alberta Health Services”? Government can’t enact regulations and standards without changing them when they impact a political constituency. To some extent that’s a good thing when it’s feedback. In Alberta’s case? AHS has been hamstrung, and used as a punching bag. If Dani actually devolve to regional boards? She will succeed in destroying public health care when costs go up and services decline. A responsible government would give AHS four budgets. Capital spend, maintenance, operations. Then they would base funding for staff on best practise. Canada maybe be intrinsically more expensive and from my experience it is. But look at what’s happening in other countries and realize the downside of ideological decisions. Healthare, food security and housing. Those are needs not wants, for a society that seeks stability!