MYTH: Our public health care system is broken, so two-tier health care must be the solution
FACT: Our health care isn’t broken, it’s being dismantled
Alberta’s public health care has been systematically starved and cut by consecutive provincial governments. Between 2014 and 2023, Alberta’s real per capita hospital spending declined by 4% — the only province where spending decreased! And despite the government knowing since at least 2023 that the Edmonton zone was on track to be short 1,500 hospital beds by 2026, this government cancelled the South Edmonton hospital project, which would have been the capital region’s first new hospital since 1988, and which would have opened this year.
In the same period, Alberta has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the for-profit surgical industry (while refusing to invest a tiny fraction of that in public surgeries), which have only served to shrink our public capacity. Yet the government has only doubled-down on privatization with Bill 11 and Bill 29, by permitting preferential paid access to surgical and diagnostic services.
Notably, Alberta’s health care workers — the very people who keep the system going and know it best — were not consulted at any stage of this massive overhaul! Instead, the government is spending millions of our public health care dollars on high-priced consultants, while policy is being shaped directly by health care insurance industry insiders.
Had they asked, they would have heard that Alberta's health care workers have worked chronically short-staffed for years, and routinely report feeling unsupported and disrespected by the government. This has tangible impacts on patient care: over 35% of allied health-care workers report that they often think about quitting their jobs. Dozens of community facilities are repeatedly closed due to lack of physicians. 90% of emergency room patients wait at least 37 hours for hospital admission — a 86% increase from 2021! Tragically, this chronic short-staffing and over-capacity resulted in seven hospital deaths, and 30 close calls over a two-week span this January alone.
It is a shocking situation, but more shocking is the complete lack of urgency from the Alberta government. Six months later, they have yet to fulfill their promise to implement triage liaison physicians in ERs.
Unlike every other country with a universal health care system, Canada’s never fully came to fruition, leaving essential services like dental, optometry, pharmaceuticals, and more, outside of the public coverage of the Medicare umbrella. Resultingly, more people pay out of pocket, more people end up in hospital with avoidable complications, and more people suffer premature deaths. Full universal public health care is the only way to ensure that everyone can get equitable access to the care they need.
Subsequently, Canada already spends a larger proportion on private health care compared to most other OECD countries — 29% of our total health care financing! If privatization were the cure to our health care issues… shouldn’t it have worked already?
Let’s not forget: private health care is only profitable with a captive market! If people could access public health care free of charge, why would they ever pay out of pocket? The only thing that two-tier health care does successfully is put public funds in private profits.
The real solution?
Get profits out of health care! And reinvest that public funding into evidence-based improvements to our public health care, including overdue expansions like Pharmacare, addressing our decades-old infrastructure deficit to improve capacity, and workforce planning to recruit and retain the health care workers we urgently need.