Danielle Smith’s Secret Plan to Destroy Public Health Care

Apparently, Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party have decided they’re going to have to destroy health care in order to save it.

That’s about the most positive spin that can be put on Ms. Smith’s plan, revealed by the Globe and Mail Tuesday, to allow doctors to set up a private stream for speedy quality health care for those who can afford it while letting the docs pad their private profits by billing the public system for slow and inferior treatment for the rest of us.

Had it not been for some public-spirited government insider leaking a draft of the planned changes to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Act to the Globe, it sounds as if the government’s strategists planned to pull it out at the end of the current sitting of the Alberta legislature next week, pass it in a hurry and then bug off for the holiday break.

With any luck, they must have thought, by the time the holiday was over and with sufficient distraction, perhaps even including an early election call, everyone would soon forget all about it.

Thanks to the estimable Carrie Tait of the Globe’s Alberta bureau, though, the outrageous plan now sits right at the centre of Alberta’s political discourse.

No wonder the UCP cabinet held an emergency meeting Monday night. That must have been called soon after Tait’s calls for comment started coming in. Either that or they’re pondering the possibility of more strikes by public employees, this time in health care, that will give them another chance to use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to punish uppity workers.

As is doubtless intended by the UCP, creating a parallel private market for physicians will also provide an opportunity to hasten the demise of public health care in Alberta and quite possibly Canada too, just as Smith has advocated throughout her career as a market-fundamentalist apparatchik and right-wing media commentator.

Whether allowing doctors to offer care in the public system at the same time as they are charging patients for private care is a violation of the Canada Health Act remains to be settled. There are varying opinions.

“If it goes forward in its current form of violation of the Canada Health Act, that means that the Alberta government is putting at risk funding that Albertans rely on for the public health care system,” observed physician and University of Toronto professor Danyaal Raza in another Globe story Tuesday.

Either way, it probably doesn’t matter all that much to the premier or her party ideologues. One way, they’ll push it through and to hell with inevitable victims of private health care. The other, it’s grist for the UCP’s separatist mill if the federal government dares to cut Alberta off from federal health funding. So from the UCP perspective, it may seem like a win-win!

Naturally, the UCP will try to sell this scheme as a way to improve access to health care for everyone, an obvious falsehood for the simple reason there’s only a limited number of doctors, and not much is being done anywhere in Canada to significantly increase their numbers.

As Alberta-based investigative journalist Charles Rusnell reported Monday in The Tyee, the UCP’s reliance on private, for-profit “chartered” surgical clinics is driving up costs and resulting in more delays for patients needing complicated surgeries in the public system.

Rusnell even found that anesthesiologists in Calgary are being scheduled to work in private clinics, sometimes against their will, by senior health managers responding to government orders.

If Smith gets her way, we can also expect to soon have to buy expensive health care insurance. This will be sold as a way to ensure our coverage is tailored to our wants and needs — which, of course, really means how much money we have in the bank.

Employers take note: Unionized employees will naturally fight to have you pick up part of the cost.

As Tait reported, the experts she talked to said the law would give Albertans with money “better access to care than those who rely on the public option.”

The changes would also create “an environment where private insurance companies could flourish.” Well, y’all know what that means — no insurance for folks with “pre-existing conditions.” They will be consigned to the crumbling public system.