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Health spending out of control |
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Written by Dave Mabell
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Thursday, February 18 2010, 9:56 PM |
Albertans could receive better health care for much less money, if decision-making happened locally. They’re paying for too many health managers, a Lethbridge audience was told Thursday.
Alberta taxpayers should also stop subsidizing companies like TransAlta and Epcor, Wildrose Alliance party leader Danielle Smith maintained during a session of the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs. And the provincial government must halt spending on wasteful “economic diversification” schemes.
Slamming the Conservative government’s recent 2010 budget — including a “true deficit” of $7.5 billion after planned borrowing — Smith singled out health care as the biggest spending problem. After doing away with regional boards and control, she said Alberta Health will actually see its costs balloon 18 per cent this year while promising only short-term improvements.
“This is an absolute admission of failure,” Smith told a near-capacity crowd. “The new superboard is not working.”
In their alternative budget, Wildrose Alliance members urged health-care budget hikes be limited to 3.5 per cent this year, matching the rate of inflation and immigration.
“We’re pouring money into a broken system.”
There’s no need to lay off nurses, doctors or other medical professionals, Smith said. Instead, her party would eliminate many of the middle-management personnel in Edmonton and across the province — in health, and many other departments — and empower front-line workers to make more decisions.
Alberta’s civil service has about 30,000 members, Smith said, nearly 6,700 of them managers. By contrast, Alberta success story WestJet has 300 managers among about 7,500 employees.
As a result, she said hospital-level decisions must now go through eight levels of approval, compared with two under the health regions the Conservative government scrapped.
On the energy front, Smith said Alberta bureaucrats took two years to approve one company’s project near Saskatchewan — while that province’s government needed just 56 days to approve the company’s similar project on the other side of the border.
Smith also blasted the provincial Conservatives for their mishandling of the energy royalties issue. In terms of investor confidence, she said Alberta has fallen to No. 92 — between Poland and Hungary — according to a recent industry survey by the Fraser Institute.
Wildrose Alliance members will be releasing their energy policy paper shortly, she said. Meanwhile they’re selling memberships, setting up party organizations in all 83 ridings and working on their overall policy platform.
The leader said her party is not ready for leadership yet — members say a conference planned for Lethbridge this weekend was downsized for lack of participants — but it will be up to the challenge by the 2012 provincial election.
“We will be ready to govern, if Albertans want us to.”
In detailed responses to questions at the mid-day meeting, Smith held the impacts of greenhouse gases on global warming remain uncertain, so Alberta should not waste billions injecting carbon dioxide underground. Nor should the government provide “corporate subsidies” to companies like Epcor and TransAlta for injecting that gas.
Smith did not reply to a question on nuclear power in Alberta, but she called for greater use of natural gas, solar power and wind power instead of coal-fired generation. While her party would delay the government’s “Green Trip” support for urban transit, she favoured commuter rail service into Calgary and Edmonton over still-wider highways, and high-speed rail service between the two cities.
But she disagreed with suggestions the Alberta government should work harder at attracting industries that aren’t related to oil and gas. Conservative leaders’ attempts to attract pulp mills, magnesium mines, meat packing plants and other ventures to Alberta have failed, she noted.
“I don’t believe it’s the government’s job to diversify our economy,” she said. “Politicians can’t tell you where our economy will be in 30 years.”
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