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Private sector not a solution for health care |
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Written by Gerald Gauthier
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Monday, June 08 2009, 11:03 PM |
The Alberta government is manufacturing a public health-care crisis it intends to solve with private-sector solutions, provincial NDP Leader Brian Mason told a standing-room audience in Lethbridge Monday evening.
The party leader made a brief stop in the city to speak at a town hall meeting organized by several groups concerned about the possible loss of local long-term care beds and the pending closure of the gynecological cytology lab at Chinook Regional Hospital.
“Without ever mentioning this during the election, they seem to have a plan to turn health care on its head in this province,” Mason said prior to the meeting hosted by Friends of Medicare, the YWCA and Womanspace Resource Centre.
“The government has no mandate to do what it’s doing to our health-care system,” he said. “All the studies that have been done show that the more private health care delivery you have in your system, the higher the costs are. So by first creating a crisis in the health-care system, then offering more private health care as the solution, the government is actually producing the opposite result to what it’s promising.”
Mason noted the health ministry’s solution to the reported shortage of some 1,400 nurses was to implement a hiring freeze and say the positions no longer needed to be filled.
“It’s absurd. If it wasn’t so tragic in its outcome, it would be funny,” he told the audience of more than 100 who packed the library’s Community Room to overflowing.
The local lobby effort recently gained the support of Lethbridge city council in its effort to prevent the planned closure of the cytology lab which conducts tests on tissue samples which help identify cervical cancer in women. The groups are worried local cancer patients would face longer wait times for test results and that more mix-ups with lab results would occur if they have to be transported to and from out-of-town labs.
Council has written to the Alberta Health Services Board asking it to reconsider its plan to centralize such operations in Calgary and Edmonton.
Mason said it appears the Stelmach government has no intention of keeping the promise it made in the last election to create 600 new long-term care beds.
Emergency wait times are skyrocketing in Alberta, he said, because acute-care beds are often filled by patients who need long-term care beds but have none available to them.
“It’s the shortage of long-term care beds that creates the backlog in emergency rooms,” he said. “They’re actually shutting down long-term care beds and they would like the private sector to deliver them. But the private sector has told them ‘If you want us to invest in long-term care beds, you’re going to have to double the fee’.”
Many seniors don’t have the means to pay the higher fees the private sector would demand, he said.
Most health-care workers are reluctant to speak out publicly for fear of job repercussions, he said, but they confide privately that they feel stressed and guilty because they’re often unable to deliver the proper standard of care.
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