EDMONTON — With the recent passing of Bill 29 in the spring session permitting private-pay diagnostic services without referral, TELUS Health hasn’t wasted any time capitalizing on their chance to charge Albertans directly out-of-pocket for diagnostic testing. A promotional email sent on June 15 advertises “Total Body MRIs Starting at $2995,” available at their TELUS Health SKY Clinic in Calgary. This is just one of many products on offer at TELUS Health Care Centres in Alberta.
“No one should have to pay for an MRI in Alberta, full stop. Yet here we are with a blatant two-tier approach to accessing diagnostic care; a boutique line for those with thousands of dollars to spare, resulting in even longer MRI wait times for everyone else,” said Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “Our health care system is already short of the skilled health care professionals and technicians we need to do medically necessary imaging and diagnostic work in Alberta. Allowing large corporations to sell health services like this will further exacerbate our workforce challenges, leaving our public health care system to fall even further behind.”
Total Body MRIs go against the medical advice of the Canadian Association of Radiologists. The Association makes it clear that these full body MRIs are not the same as clinically indicated MRIs, and say that these tests are not clinically responsible and are an illusion of proactive health, when in reality, they provide low-value care that adds strain on our limited capacity, increases inequity, and can increase clinical and psychological harm to patients.
“What TELUS is doing doesn’t have anything to do with providing better health care. This promotion will do nothing to increase capacity or access to diagnostic testing for Albertans, it’s simply a shameless push by TELUS to seek out new ways of profiting off of Albertans’ health needs and anxieties,” said Gallaway. “We should be ensuring that MRIs in Alberta are being done based on medical need, not self-referrals for expensive unnecessary testing that we know will only increase the pressures and costs in our already strained public health care system.”
Of extra concern to Albertans should be TELUS Health’s track record when it comes to forays into health care in Alberta. They have previously sought out ways to extra-bill patients, bought up the Edmonton-based Copeman Healthcare Clinic (notorious for charging membership fees for access), have ignored Alberta’s health and privacy laws with their Babylon app, and were previously given priority access to provide virtual primary care, in a sweetheart deal from the UCP government.
“This is a corporation that has relentlessly sought out ways to soak up our public health care dollars for themselves, while actively undermining our public health care system at every turn. Our governments should be stepping in to stop the selling of these Total Body MRIs, or any medically-necessary health care services, as products here in Alberta,” concluded Gallaway.
Friends of Medicare continues to ask Albertans to support our call for the federal government to Enforce the Canada Health Act and to sign up to support our campaign pushing back against the two-tier health care system being enacted by our provincial government.
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