Initial Budget Response from Chris Gallaway, Executive Director of Friends of Medicare:
EDMONTON — “Albertans are worried about accessing the health care they need when they need it. Heading into Budget 2025, we were watching for key investments in public health care including prioritizing action on health care capacity and workforce planning for a growing province. Unfortunately for Albertans, that’s not what we saw in today’s budget.
“Instead, Budget 2025 continues to roll out the government’s expensive and chaotic restructuring of public health care in Alberta, while doubling-down on their failing privatization schemes. Neither of which have delivered on promised improvements to access to health care for Albertans.
“Alberta is in a health care workforce crisis. Doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and other skilled health care workers are all telling us they are burnt out, constantly working short-staffed, and looking to leave the health care system altogether. This is an urgent situation, and we need our government to be laser-focused on the frontline workforce with a plan for retention, recruitment and training. We didn’t see that in today’s budget.
“Budget 2025 also continues to ignore long-overdue public infrastructure projects such as the South Edmonton Hospital, nor does it provide a clear plan for the full opening of the new Calgary Cancer Centre. As our population has continued to boom, we have fallen further and further behind in hospital bed capacity in Alberta. We are already short hundreds of beds in Edmonton, and thousands across the province, yet today’s budget provided no plans or timelines to get facilities built and open.
“Instead, the government is continuing to use our public health care dollars to fund the expansion of private addictions treatment centres, and to accelerate the use of private, for-profit surgical centres and other contracts with for-profit providers. Our public health care budget should go towards providing quality, timely care, not proliferating corporate profits.
“We are decades behind in needed health care infrastructure. It’s time to get to work. Alberta urgently needs a capacity plan for new beds and a workforce plan to ensure we can keep our health care system staffed and our facilities open. Today’s budget offers neither.”
More budget analysis to come from Friends of Medicare in the days ahead.
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