On April 21, “Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister” Matt Jones got up on his hind legs in the Alberta Legislature and spoke the following words:
“We’re looking at developing a voucher program where patients who have waited longer than clinically recommended can go to any approved or accredited provider in Alberta and get that surgery.”
The debate that afternoon was about long waits for surgeries that Albertans are experiencing and which, the claims of Mr. Jones’s United Conservative Government notwithstanding, don’t seem to be getting any better because of the governing party’s policy of investing in for-profit private surgical clinics instead of public health care.
It’s not clear if Mr. Jones’s statement about a voucher system for surgical patients was an accidental slip or an intentional semi-authorized leak of the latest effort by Premier Danielle Smith to Americanize public health care in Alberta as much as possible and as fast as possible.
I lean toward the former – Question Period in the Legislature is a high-pressure arena for the politicians involved – but whatever it was, this is the sort of question that needs to be followed up vigourously by media and that once upon a time in Alberta would have been.
No more, alas. Media inattention is a combination of the decline of legacy media into right-wing clickbaitery and the UCP’s adoption of Trump crony Steve Bannon’s famous stream-of-unconsciousness technique of “flooding the zone” with … stuff. In case you missed it, the stuff the UCP’s strategic brain trust was flooding the zone with last week had mostly to do with Ms. Smith’s priority separation agenda.
Well, this does keep the collective mind of the public off what The Globe and Mail’s Carrie Tait won a National News Award for last week, doesn’t it?
The result, though, was very little news coverage of this extremely concerning development. Indeed, I can only find real news story from single a daily newspaper in Alberta, The Red Deer Advocate.
Readers can look up Mr. Jones’s response in Alberta Hansard, which I’m not going to quote at length here. If they do, it will soon be clear to them that what he had to say was extremely vague and raises many questions for which he offered no answers.
While we know little about this plan, a news release from Alberta’s Friends of Medicare group outlined some of the key problems with voucher-style programs south of the Medicine Line, which the group’s executive director described as “an ideological strategy focused on promoting competition rather than ensuring well-funded facilities to provide quality and availability of care.”
As we know, commercial competition is the path the Smith Government has already decided to take, the Canada Health Act be damned, with almost all aspects of health care. So in that regard at least, this announcement, if that’s what it was, comes as no surprise. Everyone who studies health care understands that vouchers will neither reduce surgical costs nor shorten wait times.
“We could improve access by centralizing our wait lists or by expanding underutilized public capacity,” Friends of Medicare Director Chris Gallaway said. “We don’t need a convoluted voucher scheme to do that.”
“Instead, we have operating rooms sitting empty and unused every single day, because this government would rather double-down on its failed privatization strategy than ensure that our public hospitals are funded and staffed properly. At every turn this government seems determined to further entrench a for-profit health care market, irrespective of the cost or suffering it will have on Albertans waiting for surgeries.”
Nevertheless, there are many questions that need to be answered immediately since this is likely a policy the government is going to push forward to implement.
For example, what process will be used to determine priority for surgical patients at, as Mr. Jones put it, “any approved or accredited provider in Alberta”?
What limits on wait times will be set? Will all kinds of surgery be impacted at once, or will some sort of priority schedule be cobbled together? How will the cost of surgeries be determined? What fees or co-pays will patients be required to pay in addition to the health care system’s share of the costs? What role if any does Mr. Jones imagine the private insurance industry will have in this plan? Or is the insurance industry already “helping” to write the legislation for the UCP?
Above all, when does the government propose to move ahead with this bad idea?
By the way, I put Mr. Jones’s title in scare quotes in the lead because he holds only one of the four health portfolios Premier Smith has invented.
This has not been done, rest assured, because of the complexity of the old Health portfolio, which could be handled by one minister with the assistance of a Parliamentary secretary. It is being done to muddy the waters as the government proceeds with its program of privatizing health care on the U.S. model, a development that should frighten every Albertan.
A health minister is not supposed to run the health care system like a CEO. Her job, or his, is to set the policy direction – something that is clearly now being done in the Premier’s Office.
This is why I think of Mr. Jones and his three colleagues – former health minister Adriana LaGrange, now minister of primary and preventative health services, Rick Wilson, minister of mental health and addiction, and Jason Nixon, minister of assisted living and social services – not by their official titles but as the Four Horsemen of the Health Care Apocalypse.
Here endeth the lesson.
Danielle Smith is known to lie, and she will continue to lie. Prior to the provincial election in Alberta, three years ago, Danielle Smith had made a commitment to preserving public healthcare in this province. Empty promises to get the UCP re-elected. People who were easily fooled, fell for it. The vast majority of the media still will never criticize the UCP and Danielle Smith for their major missteps, while they will continue to lie about the Alberta NDP and Naheed Nenshi. Prior to the last provincial election in Alberta the media didn’t scruitize the UCP and Danielle Smith for how badly they were running things, and they were lying about Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP, and that’s precisely the reason why the NDP lost the provincial election. Had the media actually done their job, and scrutinized the UCP and Danielle Smith for their epic boondoogles, and how poorly they governed, we would still have Rachel Notley as our premier. Ralph Klein did so much damage to the public healthcare system in Alberta, because he wanted it privatized. Danielle Smith’s hero is Ralph Klein, and she surely wants private for profit healthcare in Alberta. We used to have good quality columnists in newspapers. That’s lacking. We see the likes of Licia Corbella (now retired), David Staples, Rick Bell, and Lorne Gunter openly praising the UCP and Danielle Smith. If they do criticize the UCP and Danielle Smith, it’s very weak and meaningless.
Health vouchers! The greatest thing since magic beans, or perhaps Social Credit’s funny money? Yet another indication the UCP actually is your grandfather’s conservative party.
How these magic vouchers will work is unclear. After all this just slipped out, or was a trial balloon being floated. Given the backlogs are being created by the UCPs reluctance to spend more on public health care, I feel this will likely be another instance of more public money being directed to private health care facilities, probably at a higher per patient cost. In other words it will just be an updated word and system for what led to the recent AHS scandals.
I suppose the UCP communications people will love the more innocuous and somewhat magic, mysterious word of vouchers for this. Heck, they may have even came up with it.
In any event, it takes a lot of gall to return to the scene, but this current UCP bunch are brazen and arrogant and probably think they can get away with it. Perhaps they can, but this sort of return can also sometimes lead to downfall.
Dave: At least the goal of Social Credit scrip was to make a dreadful situation better for the benefit of the many, while the goal of the Wildrose/UCP vouchers is to make an imperfect situation much worse to benefit a tiny minority. DJC
Frustrating how the guardians of the galaxy bray at everything being tried to improve a failing system…but never provide options other than throw more money at it. If you investigated how voucher systems WORK in numerous European counties then maybe you wouldn’t be so condescending and dismissive, unless of course you’re not actually interested in fixing a decrepit system. Why can I go to Saskatchewan to get surgery in days while I have to stand in an exhausting wait line in Alberta for months. Why can foreigners come to Canada and take advantage of the “medical tourism” industry and receive the services they require…from doctors working in provincial healthcare systems, while I stand on the outside looking in? Why are 10’s of thousands of Canadians using medical tourism to access surgeries in other countries which they can’t access here? NO jurisdiction in Canada can attract enough doctors or nurses because the current system stifles innovation. When there are no consequences for failure there are no incentives to improve and Canada has so much bureaucratic chlamydia the system is on life support…unless of course you have power, wealth, connections or union negotiated health benefits. Have you ever seen a member of the Flames or Oilers, injured during a game waiting for healthcare services? They’re usually diagnosed before the sun comes up the following day, a rehab regime is being mapped out, physiological, dietary and entire support systems are in place. Oh my god….how American is that? Why aren’t you rising up on your hind legs and crying foul? Vouchers may not work the way they’re designed and there’ll be bugs in the system, but you’ll be there howling in hysterics at how the govt has failed us…again. I needed help while Notley was in power and had hopes changes would be made. Her unionized govt thinking hired 5000 odd staff but fixed nothing. I went to Montana and paid for what I needed within 10 days and was home. MY QUALITY OF LIFE IS WORTH EVERY PENNY I’VE SPENT.
Private healthcare is a scam. There. I said it. Scam.
My sister recently didn’t want to wait for cataract surgery because, well, she’s old and she’d like to read again for awhile before old age takes her.
So, she thought she’d check into getting it done privately. She went there, they told her it would cost 2k.
When she got there for the surgery, they told her it would be 10k.
That’s what privatization does. They take your most vulnerable times in your life and try to turn them into immense profit opportunities and clean out the bank accounts of the elderly, ill and frail who aren’t in fit condition to argue or look elsewhere. They don’t shorten wait times, they lengthen them by providing a pressure outlet for the government.
As far as I’m concerned, private health care should banned. Period. If you’re a healthcare provider that doesn’t want to work for the system, move south. They suck money out of the healthcare system that we’re all paying taxes to provide a good life for our fellow citizens.
Don’t waste time letting for-profit healthcare frame the debate because even giving them the right to clip toenails moves the needle in their favour. Once they have their nose in the tent it won’t be long before they’ve moved into it…then they’ll be eating the canvas and the tent poles and the stakes until there’s nothing left but a smoking campfire hole in the middle where a cozy, life-saving tent used to stand.
Ban it. Period.
Private health care is late capitalism’s last stand – when we’ve exploited all the resources and made all the stuff, imprisoning people, selling water, harvesting data, and making the sick an offer they can’t refuse are the only ways left to grow.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the federal Liberal response to Alberta’s Medicare demolition derby has been … crickets. This includes silence from one of their newest MPs, Danielle Martin MD, whose 2017 book, “Better Now”, dumped all over the idea of health care privatization. Just another careerist?
This is beyond horrific. I have formed a relationship with my surgeon and require a very complicated surgery which includes several branches of surgeons being in the OR at the same time. I just spent five days in the hospital and the nursing staff is bounced around to so many areas they can’t do their job properly. A patient is now information on a computer screen and if they miss a page it’s tough luck
@DJC I don’t usually leave links but your commenters might want to see this:
Wow.
“Above all, when does the government propose to move ahead with this bad idea?” Shortly after the next election, after having vigorously denied it during the campaign.
Mr. C. hit the nail on the head. We will get these asinine announcements on a daily basis to distract and overwhelm us from everything that has gone on prior. Smith has not quite reached the Rubicon but there will come a time when we have to seriously consider leaving the province. If there was any doubt of the UCP losing the next election, her gerrymandering will eliminate any doubt. To add insult to injury the UCP could not ask for a more compliant opposition.
Jaundiced Eye: What compliant opposition? The Alberta NDP and Naheed Nenshi that the media refuses to acknowledge, and that the UCP and Danielle Smith keep out of the Alberta Legislature, by reducing the number of Legislature sessions to hardly anything.
These UCP are looking haggard. Perhaps they’ll endorse a brand of under-eye concealer as a side gig. Why not? Isn’t everything for sale now? Maybe they’ll open a United Cosmetic Procedures™ clinic that works on the voucher system…and UCP™ dental veneers. It might be a little trickier scamming the public purse for hair extensions, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Once again, the Smith government shows that it is not interested in your health, only in lining their pockets. I just finished listening to the the link above and it is maddening, the steps this government will take in order to protect their agenda!!
Do you know if any of the Ministers will attend the International Day of Mourning for workers tomorrow? https://canadianlabour.ca/events/day-of-mourning-ceremonies-2026/
The theme this year is Psychological Safety; the ‘broad and long reaching impacts of psychological safety and the lack of supports in jobs that are getting increasingly dangerous for the mental health of workers’.
I would encourage all the Ministers of Health to attend, as well as the Minister of Education.
I will be there in honour of my love. He worked hard for the children in his care, but in the end could not bear that Sisyphean task and chose to bow out.
I hear there will be sunshine tomorrow.
Emily: I expect to be there. I don’t expect to see any UCP cabinet ministers. If I’m wrong, I’ll let you know. DJC
“[Operating] rooms sitting empty and unused every single day” … sometimes this happens because of a breakdown in medical device reprocessing in a relatively new hospital…
https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/news/Page19690.aspx
Reminder, the Grande Prairie Regional Hospital opened in December 2021, after a 10-year, politically fraught construction and commissioning journey that saw the initial general contractor, Graham Construction, fired by the then-NDP government and replaced by Clark Builders.
https://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xID=60598AFCAD207-96DB-E76B-961B5B14ABADDC86