LETHBRIDGE — A new report commissioned by Friends of Medicare from the Parkland Institute and authored by Salimah Valiani titled, “Public Funds for Private Profit: The Evolution of Health Care Privatization in Alberta” was released publicly today, outlining the systematic privatization efforts of Alberta’s health care system by successive provincial governments since the 1990s.
The report looks back to Ralph Klein’s defunding and privatization of the health care system, from Bill 11 to the Mazankowski Commission and the ‘Third Way,’ drawing a direct link from the 1990s to the privatization schemes we see today, including the recently tabled and passed Bill 55: Health Statutes Amendment Act which allows the government to choose for-profit providers for public hospitals.
“Our public health care system has been systematically underfunded and underresourced to the point that it’s struggling to provide the care that Albertans need or deserve. But instead of working to ensure quality, timely public health care is accessible to all Albertans, our governments have continually handed their responsibility off to private operators, and tried to convince us that privatization is the only solution,” says Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “Not only have we repeatedly subsidized private profits with our public health care dollars, but when these operators fail to turn a profit, it is always the public system left holding the bag.”
The report documents how Alberta’s decades-long track record of successive governments’ experiments with privatization in health care services like surgeries and medical laboratories have repeatedly failed to lower costs or improve health care access for Albertans, and have contributed to poorer transparency and accountability when it comes to the delivery and financing of public health care services.
“As this report shows, privatization of health care has failed Albertans time and time again. And it should come as no surprise that as our government is once again prioritizing profit in our health care system over providing care, that access to care is decreasing as inequity increases,” says Gallaway. “But our provincial government has stubbornly refused to learn this lesson, and keep trying to rehash what we already know: privatization does not work.”
This is just the latest in a series of recent reports showing that the government’s chaotic restructuring, chronic underfunding and privatization of Alberta’s health care system are failing to deliver on access to health care and shorter wait times for surgeries.
“We can rebuild our public health care to ensure equity and accessibility, but we need our government to learn from Alberta’s long history of failed health care privatization and finally start putting patients ahead of profits and getting serious about a health care capacity and workforce plan,” concluded Gallaway.
-30-