Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, lifelong advocate of private health care, moved unexpectedly yesterday to nationalize the province’s recently privatized medical lab services.
Health Minister Adriana LaGrange made the announcement at what looked like a hastily organized press conference in Red Deer, but she made it clear the deed was done on Ms. Smith’s instructions.
“An agreement in principle has been reached with ownership of DynaLife to transfer staff, equipment and property in all regions of the province to Alberta Precision Laboratories,” the government said in the news release it published yesterday afternoon. “This work will be completed in phases with the full transition expected to be completed by December 2023.”
DynaLife Medical Labs is the private company that had operated successfully in the Edmonton area for years that the government allowed to take over medical lab services in Calgary in December 2022, with disastrous results.
The government claimed the deal would save $18 million and the health minister at the time, Jason Copping, promised “this change really sums up the rationale for contracting: enhanced services at a lower cost. First and foremost, it will give Albertans more and better services.”
Alberta Precision Laboratories is the wholly owned subsidiary of Alberta Health Services, the province’s public health agency, which efficiently operated Calgary public medical testing until the DynaLife takeover last year. APL continued to be responsible for medical lab tests within Alberta hospitals after the privatization.
No one has explained why, but the privatization was a fiasco from the get-go. Simple medical tests in Calgary and southern Alberta took longer and longer for patients to get. With its lab privatization scheme in a shambles, the government was forced in August to turn to APL in a desperate bid to keep the system from collapsing.
But who saw “de-privatization,” as The Canadian Press squeamishly put it, coming?
Hardly anyone, judging from the instant commentary on social media yesterday afternoon.
Well, two things are for sure:
One, things must have been even worse than anyone imagined in Calgary for a government run by Ms. Smith to take such a dramatically out-of-character step to remedy it.
Two, notwithstanding her impeccable market-fundamentalist credentials, Ms. Smith risks being struck from the Christmas card lists of organizations like the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Taxpayers Association for this!
Jason Kenney, the province’s former United Conservative Party premier who pulled the plug on the previous NDP government’s plan to build a province-wide medical super-lab in Edmonton shortly after his election in 2019 must be spinning like a top, wherever he’s hiding out nowadays.
Tyler Shandro, who was Mr. Kenney’s first health minister, tweeted angrily that July: “The real purpose of the superlab was to nationalize Dynalife for $50 million of taxpayers’ money in 2022. That agenda was sheer ideology and we cancelled it. Instead we’ll work with the lab system to meet the priority needs for patients.”
Today, Mr. Shandro is a private citizen, presumably between jobs since the May 29 provincial election. And it sounds very much as if the dark NDP plot Mr. Shandro described is about to be realized by Mr. Kenney’s successor!
In a news release yesterday, NDP Health Critic Luanne Metz, a physician, pointed out that “DynaLife is the provider selected by the UCP after they destroyed Alberta’s publicly owned lab system in 2019 and embarked on a three-year dedicated drive to privatize its crucial work.
“Now that public lab has to bail out DynaLife,” she continued. “This is the UCP’s reckless experiment in privatization – all the money goes to a private operator, and all the risk lands on Alberta taxpayers and Alberta families. … This is pure incompetence.”
This raises a crucial question about yesterday’s announcement – which Ms. LaGrange failed to answer. To wit: How much is this “de-privatization” going to cost?
“I’d love to know how much this misadventure has cost the taxpayer,” tweeted former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi. “What were the contract break fees on the super lab? How much was Dynalife being paid under the sole-source (was it?) contract? What are the new break fees? Who are DynaLyfe’s lobbyists and their payment?”
One imagines that when all the dust has settled, the cost of the entire privatization scheme will considerably exceed the $50 million Mr. Shandro complained about in 2019.
For her part, Ms. LaGrange described the takeover as “a mutual agreement” and told a reporter that Alberta Health Services is still in negotiations with DynaLife’s owners – North Carolina-based Laboratory Corp. of America and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System. “We have a memorandum of understanding but the final details are still being worked out.”
The cost, she said, “is not something that I can share. But as we move forward, we will be able to make that readily available to the public. We want to be transparent.”
The nationalization will also have impacts for the Health Sciences Association of Alberta , the union that represents APL and DynaLife employees.
Last year’s privatization resulted in HSAA members being treated differently depending on whether or not they were transferred from the public system. Last month, HSAA successfully negotiated an agreement that was supposed to get its members to parity by 2025. Now that all of them will be APL employees by the end of this year, presumably, parity will come sooner.
I’m pretty sure the last time anything like this happened in Alberta, maybe the only other time, was when Peter Lougheed’s government acquired a majority interest in Pacific Western Airlines, which did most of its business in Alberta, and moved the company’s headquarters from Vancouver to Calgary.
Wonder what caused DynaLife to run aground in Calgary? As noted, DynaLife was no spring chicken having been around in Edmonton for years with no problems. The move south to Calgary, the heartland of enterprising free markets, should have been a smooth transition. Was it pure incompetence on the part of the DynaLife Calgary branch?Maybe one or two people in management were rubbing people the wrong way? Or were they encountering bureaucratic intransigence within APL, managers unwilling to give up their private fiefdoms? If so, it seems to suggest AHS is a murky alliance of medieval-style kingdoms that even a privatizing white knight in shinning armour, Daniele Smith, could not penetrate?
I understand that DynaLife wanted to pay 10% less to new hires.
I like how alt-rights just ask questions. Stupid questions, but they’re just asking.
Most businesses fail. Most of them in the first year, the private market is not more efficient than the public system, it just allows the siphoning off of profits by a parasitic corporate class who believe it is our lot in life to work for them. It’s been widely reported that dynalife employees were (even in Edmonton) expected to do more with less, it’s almost like if you try to apply that to the entire health care system, one already dealing with staffing shortages and long wait times, it falls apart under the weight of its own hubris.
you should really stop using ten dollar words because a fiefdom is what these corporate fat cats are gunning for, and we are the serfs.
Nah, no need to create some elaborate conspiracy theory when Occams Razor will suffice.
It was simple incompetence and the fact that privatization never delivers what corrupt politicians say it will.
Shandro might well be between jobs at the moment, however he is guilty of false advertising. His old office frontage still proclaims him
MLA for Calgary Acadia. That’ll be the day!
I think there is precedent: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/private-calgary-clinic-faces-bankruptcy-1.900875
I suspect some influential UCP donors found out that they were on the short end of the stick awaiting lab appointments, then waiting hours once they arrived, only to find out that some simple lab tests weren’t being done at all.
Back to the question, “Whose premier is she?”
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/danielle-smith-s-lobbying-record-holds-clues-to-her-governing-agenda-observers-say-1.6147253
Clearly, Danielle Smith is not working in the public interest. Once again, she burns through public money like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe there won’t be once she’s done with us. Do you think she’d be bold or stupid enough to try to sell the labs off again to another bidder? This is Danielle Smith we’re talking about here and chaos is her middle name. It’s enough to make a person wonder if she is an anarchist in libertarian clothing.
Remembering that even Ayn Rand took advantage of social security and Medicare in her golden years.
https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ayn-rand-collected-social-security-medicare.html
Ah yes, nationalization. The favourite tool of the socialists, both are swear words for Fraulein Shmidt and her neofascist cohorts. Notable too that she sent her loyal sloth, Ol’ Sleepy Eyes LaGrange, to fall on her sword with nary a word from Shmidt herself. In the meantime we will witness this action framed as the UCP swooping in to defend health services while not acknowledging their own role as destructors. As one prolific poster here is fond of saying, I’m gonna need some more popcorn!
“Nationalization, the favourite tool of socialists” – try pulling the other one. The Alberta Government gave the power of nationalization to the oil industry to steal farm and ranch land ever since they found out it was more convenient to drill straight down, rather than find an adjacent landowner who did not mind having them directional drill from their land. Now the puffed up little Dani nuts have told farmers and ranchers they are not allowed to put up solar panels on their land.
I get it Kang, I was just trying to be ironic. Fraulein Schmidt sails to whichever end of the political spectrum that will benefit her and her friends.
My apologies F of F: I must be getting grumpy in the era of Fraulein Schmidt.
“This is the UCP’s reckless experiment in privatization – all the money goes to a private operator, and all the risk lands on Alberta taxpayers and Alberta families.”
It is simply the logical result of the neoliberal corporate state capitalism that everyone knows and loves; where, the mythology of the dominant ‘greed is good’ economic religion reigns supreme [i.e., where the sacrosanct nature of private personal profit backstopped by the state and its obligatory socialization of costs and losses only serves to reinforce both the behavior and the mythology, for example, in the larger context of game theory, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the ‘winning’ of the economic game by being individually selfish.] and is largely unquestioned [due to a withering and unrelenting cognitive dissonance one assumes] by the mob of enthusiastic, get rich by any means necessary or die trying, disciples of refined intellectual doublethink. Therefore, it must certainly be time, once again, to double down on the myth, along with all of its negative spillovers, contradictions, and inefficiencies, because in this particular iteration of the ‘game’ it is not possible to have one without the others.
“but she made it clear the deed was done on Ms. Smith’s instructions.” Minister LaGrange merely wanted her backers to know that she was more than happy to allow a shambolic privatized health care organization to continue operations in Alberta.
Surely, there must be a Ministry to give to LaGrange to minimize the damage she creates. I realize they will never get rid of her because she does what she is told. Why not make up a Ministry for something that does not exist, like Doug Ford did for his nephew?
As an aside, I believe Smith has turned socialist. First, she puts the halt on private business building and operating renewable energy and then she Nationalizes Dynalife. All of these are for profit corporations. I expect statues of Lenin to start showing up at the McDougall Centre in Calgary.
Maybe we could ask the twenty or so thousand Albertans that ucp pragmatism has killed over the last four years if they would accept NDP ideology and their lives back. Oh yeah, when your dead what’s the difference. I’d say we could ask their families but I get the impression that a majority of hardcore ucp voters would gladly sacrifice their entire family for their ideology.
Your headline picture! A back drop of empty vessels? And you think their people have any expertise in comms? Well, they do. But the UCP can’t get the punchline!
Is that Adriana Lagrange or Dr. Bunsen Honeydew? I’m waiting for her to show us her next experiment: the banana sharpener, the robot politician? Stay tuned for another exciting episode of Muppet Labs.
Broken News! https://youtu.be/xFpcc9sbvPI?t=1
I’m sorry Abs, I must take exception to your equating Adriana LaGrange to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. The Muppet Show was funny.
Everything the UCP touches, they destroy, and it costs more money to return things to some state of normality. The UCP are a big joke. They are following their hero, Ralph Klein. How many lives will be lost, due to the UCP’s messing with the public healthcare system in Alberta? It was a similar situation when Ralph Klein was premier. This stupidity wasn’t seen under Peter Lougheed.
I dunno if I see it so much as a de privatization Or another gift
Of millions of dollars from
Danielle “14 words smith” & the alberta treasury to American billionaires. I’m sure their main concern was a fair deal for alberta taxpayers, right ? Not a give away to a business that likely no longer wanted to be in the failing business they were making their business ? I dn. Not a business guy. Think they should be flung into volcanoes.
Oh good, can we please have our Family Doctors paid properly and brought back now? And while they are eating humble pie… how about funding EMS again too so we aren’t dying waiting for an ambulance?
If this is their competence in handling health care… imagine their economic prowess when it comes to the idiotic decisions they are making with the Province’s finances??!
Traditional conservative minded voters must be aghast about this. Surely this was not what they expected when they reluctantly stuck with Smith and the UCP and voted for them a few months ago. Of course, they knew she was a bit of a loose cannon who often said or did unpredictable things, but I bet never ever did they expect she would be de-privatizing or re-nationationizing lab services. Particularly because it was the same party, the UCP, that just recently fully privatized them in Calgary.
So, yes things must have been really really bad for the UCP to reverse course so quickly. I expect this will be frequently referred to as a failed experiment after this, despite Smith and the UCP’s efforts to portray it otherwise.
Kenney and Shandro must be spinning or have smoke coming out of their ears about this now. Of course the former at least was never a fan of Smith’s anyways. Shandro seemed to start out as a Smith skeptic, but later became much more supportive after she became leader, perhaps to keep his position in cabinet and as an MLA. Well it sort of worked for him initially. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts about this, if he were brave enough to speak up.
However, I suppose the thoughts of the former Premier and the former Health Minister are not quite as important as us getting information about how much this will cost us to fix the UCP’s previous mistake.
While many might claim that Dyna-Life was doing a good job in Edmonton and Northern Alberta, the fact is they had significant problems here long before they got handed Calgary and Southern Alberta. Just recently I went for some tests, and a person in the line mentioned that they would have to wait at least 6 months for an appointment here. They do not take appointments before 09:00, but are open at 07:00 most days. Also for walk-ins after about 11:00 am or so the wait time can range anywhere from 2 to more than 3 hours. I tried their new Save My Place feature, but it still results in a lengthy wait. We have been fortunate to have figured out how to get our tests done without an excessive wait.
Medical lab services in Alberta have been a political football for so long, this story probably belongs in the Sports pages. First, the Jim Prentice PC government tried to get AHS to bring in some Australian multinational to replace both DynaLife and AHS’ own lab services. That plan was kiboshed in 2015 after the NDP came to power, and later on they announced that AHS would take over DynaLife’s existing lab services and the building of the Edmonton “Superlab” — a project about which I was somewhat dubious at the time, for reasons I’ll get into in a mo.
Then, in 2019, Jason Kenney’s UCP government shut down the Superlab project even though construction had already started, bulldozing the site and returning it to a grassy field, like the Space Marines in the James Cameron movie ‘Aliens’, “nuking the site from orbit”. AHS’ lab services were spun off into a new, separate, corporate subsidiary called “Alberta Precision Laboratories”, or APL, for reasons unknown, and a contract was awarded to DynaLife to expand its operations beyond the parts of Alberta where it had not previously operated, including Calgary Zone, and APL’s scope of work was largely limited to in-hospital lab specimen collection and testing.
Before the end of last year, while DynaLife did do a good deal of the lab testing for central & northern Alberta, outside Edmonton people still went either to their local hospital or a satellite lab collection site run by AHS/APL to have blood dawn or drop off specimens collected at home. Those samples needing testing at DynaLife were shipped there from the collection sites, so all of this was back-office, not patient-facing. Other specimens would be sent to the nearest local or regional hospital lab for testing.
So, for instance, in my community — Grande Prairie — there were three collection sites for people to go for their lab work, one at the hospital (until December 2021, the QE II, & then the GPRH), one at the College & Community Health Centre on the campus of Northwestern Polytechnic, and one in a commercial development in the downtown core called Junction Point. Parking at Junction Point was free and convenient, so most people went there; the College clinic is a primary care clinic run jointly by AHS & NWP, and so people could see their physician or NP and have their lab work (and even X-Rays) done before leaving; parking there is paid, except when the College is in summer session (Apr-Aug), but plentiful. The hospital outpatient lab, while being less convenient due to the very limited parking at the old QE II site, was the preferred collection site for certain specialized tests, and was also convenient for people attending various ambulatory care clinics on the site. After the new hospital opened, outpatient lab services relocated to the new site, and while parking is not free there either, there is far more of it.
But then DynaLife came in. They leased an office space in a location with very limited parking, and a traffic flow not well suited to their service. There was a distinct lack of clarity initially about whether patients attending ambulatory clinics at GPRH, including pre-admission clinics and the Cancer Centre, and patients discharged from hospital with lab requisitions in hand, had to leave the hospital and go to DynaLife to get that done; APL later clarified that a lab req from an AHS clinic or hospital could be drawn at the hospital outpatient lab, and that DynaLife was for community lab clients — i.e, from family physician clinics, walk-in clinics, and the like.
Now, I’m going to touch on the “superlab”, and in fact the entire notion of centralizing all lab services. We are long past the era of some lab technologist labouriously pipetting serum and reagents into test tubes to conduct chemistry & other tests: now most tests are done using automated analyzers that can generate results in minutes. Results are also uploaded immediately into the patient’s Connect Care electronic health record and Alberta Netcare Portal for instantaneous viewing by the ordering provider.
This is all wonderful, but what good is such rapid test turnaround if it takes 2-4 business days for the sample to even get to that centralized superlab? Before such centralization, most tests drawn in the community, or in a rural hospital, were sent to a nearby regional hospital lab for processing, with results often available the same day or, at worst, the next day. Centralization should be reserved for those more esoteric investigations that don’t require rapid return of results but are impractical for a dispersed analysis system.
The intention of having AHS take over private sector lab work in Calgary is not about providing better care to Albertans. That’s just a consequence of a corporation dictating to the UCP that they are not making enough money on this venture, so take it back. Never assume, as many commenters have, that the UCP is working for the public. They are not. They are owned by the corporate class and the corporate class will dictate, behind closed doors of course, what this corporate party will do.
I think that’s the crux of it, otherwise dynalife would be howling like a banshee about contracts
“United Conservative Party nationalizes privatized medical lab services – who saw that coming?”
Honestly? I figured it would only happen after the patient deaths, doctor protest, lawsuits and a subsequent judicial inquiry.
But what do I know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, who of us saw this coming? Perhaps some if they knew the true status of the corporation. When I heard it on the news, my being from B.C., the first thought was, wonder how this helps money laundering and who benefits most. The citizens will only benefit if the service improves and that may not happen. If the company was in financial difficulty, Smith gave them a nice present and hand out-up and the taxpayers get to pay the bills, with no improvement in services.
It does seem weird that something like a lab can’t get their act together. There are sucessful models all over the country.
I do wonder what the real reason Smith is doing this because it can’t be for the province or the people who need blood tests. She may only be doing this to sell the business to a private company in another year, saying the system has been fixed and the province needs the money.
I’d have a look at who owns the buildings and land the lab clinics they sit on/in. Will rents suddenly increase, will leases be terminated and new ones signed for more money with UPC members. (Stevie Cameron wrote about the Mulroney years and how the game was played–it also explained why some of the federal offices were moved and staff couldn’t figure out why)
This will not end well and I look forward to reading about the first case where a politico looked at some one’s lab tests. (just reemember Harper’s crowd looking at Veteran’s medical records to try to use the information against them)
You also have to wonder how this affair is being seen in Ontario by municipal employees, their unions & their retirees. Are their pensions at risk, given the plan fund’s ownership stake in DynaLife, which some reports I’ve read claim OMERS to be its largest shareholder?
Jerry: I suspect but can’t yet prove that a big part of this story is what the privatization last year did to DynaLife’s share price and how that impacts various stakeholders, including pension plans. Another relevant question, asked by former mayor Nenshi, is what kind of guarantees of deliverables were written into the contract. Not many and not much, I imagine. DJC