Below is a statement from Friends of Medicare's executive director Chris Gallaway:
EDMONTON — On Friday, in response to our ongoing advocacy to protect public health care, the provincial government sent a statement to the media that attacked the credibility of Friends of Medicare, including stating that: “They [Friends of Medicare] routinely spread misinformation and hyperbolic predictions; it’s misleading to cite them as if they were impartial or expert.”
Since 1979 Friends of Medicare has consistently spoken up in the interest of patients and front-line health care workers in Alberta. We’re proud of our decades-long track record of non-partisan, transparent and evidence-based public health care advocacy.
Unfortunately, it seems to be becoming increasingly common that when politicians cannot defend the merits of their own policies they resort to directly attacking their policy critics instead.
But, given this public attack on our credibility, now is an opportune time to look back on the track record of some of the noteworthy public policy predictions Friends of Medicare has made under this government:
Lab Services
Following many years of experience advocating around improving laboratory services, Friends of Medicare repeatedly warned the government that their plan to carve off our community lab services and award a sweetheart deal to DynaLIFE to operate them privately would be doomed to failure. After months of chaos the government had to reverse course, step in and re-nationalize lab services. The Auditor General recently found that this privatization scheme wasted at least $125 million of our public health care dollars. The government has yet to take responsibility for this costly failure or the harm it caused patients.
Surgeries
After the provincial government announced the Alberta Surgical Initiative, a privatization scheme designed to use public health care dollars to push more surgeries into for-profit surgical centres, Friends of Medicare was consistently vocal in telling them that all of the evidence showed their plan would worsen our staffing shortages and harm our public operating rooms, while not bringing down costs or wait times as the government claimed it would. Since then report after report after report, including the government’s own data, have shown that the privatization of Alberta’s surgeries to for-profit facilities is costing us more, while ultimately harming our surgical capacity and leaving Albertans waiting even longer for serious, life-saving surgical care. In spite of this, the government continues to push further surgical privatization in their newly released provincial budget.
Restructuring
When the plan for the massive restructuring of Alberta Health Services was leaked, and then ultimately announced publicly, Friends of Medicare predicted that it would not solve our underlying workforce and capacity issues and raised the alarm that the plan would likely become a costly distraction that would create chaos and be used by the government as cover for pushing forward further privatization. Now, here we are.
Bill 11 & Two Tier Health Care
Friends of Medicare, the Canadian Health Coalition, the Canadian Medical Association, Canadian Doctors for Medicare, health policy experts, academics, health coalitions, labour unions, Members of Parliament & Senators, front-line doctors, nurses and health care workers, and advocates from across the country have all raised the alarm that implementing Bill 11 will bring two tier American (not 'European') health care into Alberta.
It will be up to Albertans to decide if they choose to believe the credibility of the growing number of voices who are now calling what our government is doing an existential threat to our treasured single-payer public health care system in Canada.
Especially when weighed against the credibility of a Premier and government that has misled media about what Bill 11 does, got caught manipulating public reporting of health data going into the last election, destroyed evidence during an Auditor General investigation and continues to do everything they can to sweep the very serious allegations of potential corruption around the awarding of surgical contracts under the rug.
Friends of Medicare urges all Albertans to take action in the fight to save our public health care by signing our petition, sending an email to the federal health minister, attending one of our upcoming town halls or events, joining us as a member and signing up to volunteer.