The Issue

As someone that is married to a health care professional, I can tell you that there are so many things that could not only be better but also more cost effective. We spend about 41% of our budget on health care. That’s over $34 billion dollars. It’s a truly staggering amount. What is more concerning though is that outcomes are not getting better. ER wait times are getting worse. People are literally dying in the waiting rooms because they are overcrowded.

As an analogy of what is happening, picture our health care system like an airplane. It is currently flying, but it has several warning buttons going off. Low fuel (front line staff), major stress to the air frame (lack of resources), and the flight attendants (administration) are getting mixed messages from the captain, while the captain assures the passengers (the public) that everything is fine. Without proper planning, the UCP decides to rip the plane apart while in the air to solve the problem. Replacing one wing on one side that doesn’t match the other. Then they decide that the wing they replaced wasn’t right, so they replace it again with something different. Meanwhile, because they ripped a wing off, passengers are falling out through the tear they caused in the body of the plane. The low fuel? It has been forgotten about because they were too busy painting a new decal on the outside to convince everyone that its new and shiny.

Restructuring our health care system is probably necessary. Facts don’t lie. Many of the best performing health care systems in the world use a hybrid of both public and private care. This is what the UCP is using as the justification for the changes they are making. They have completely ignored the fact that those systems have more doctors and patient beds in them. See the graphic below as an example.

There are also high performing systems that remain public, but they are also structured differently with doctors that are employees of the health system (not private corporations operating a clinic that bills the government) that receive financial incentive to improve patient health; quitting smoking for example. But restructuring a system requires careful planning, well executed rollouts and full consultation with health care professionals, especially those on the front lines. The UCP has not done any of this. Since the UCP started restructuring AHS, from 2024-2026, we are spending almost $7 billion more on health care largely due to restructuring efforts. Those numbers are in the provincial budget sheets. Do you feel a positive $7 billion difference in the care you receive? Neither do I.

I have listened to front line health professionals who end up in meetings where administration talks about restructuring, but there are no details to share about how it will affect the front-line staff. What was the point of the meeting? How many patients could have been seen instead of staff being asked to sit in on a meeting so they could be told about very broad level changes that have no details?

Our leader, Peter Guthrie, is a former cabinet minister. He was in the room as these things were being discussed. The UCP was in such a hurry to show that they were taking action on health care that they skipped the planning and went straight to restructuring. And that part about replacing the wing? It is happening a lot. Why? There was no actual plan or consultation.

Resources that were once all under AHS are now divided amongst the new pillars, and are not shared as needed between them; even when they are available and not being used. Patients and residents in our long-term care facilities are paying the price.

On the other side we have the NDP who want to keep everything public. Don’t touch the system, just spend more money. We have been doing that for decades and it isn’t getting better. Something has to change, but it needs to be done right.

I wish I could say we could go back, but the additional money to take everything back to the AHS model would waste even more money. Instead, we need to build more hospitals and patient beds. We need a plan to recruit more doctors, especially in family medicine. We need to stop picking fights with our health care professionals and sit down and talk to them. Not just the administration staff. Their perspective is important and must be heard, but we also need to consult with our front-line staff in a way where they can be free to express their opinions and concerns without fear of recrimination.

All of this should have happened before we introduced a private stream that uses public beds. Our health care system is not a political pawn to swing from one extreme to the other. You deserve better. We need political leaders that will actually listen to our professionals. That’s who I am, and that is what out party is committed to doing.

Solutions

Family Doctors

To recruit more family doctors, it starts at the education level. We need to incentivize students to see that being a family doctor or general practitioner (GP) is a feasible option. In one way or another, we need to bring the cost of their education down. Being a family doctor does not have the same end financial payoff as more specialized fields of study.

We can look at incentivizing this area of study by targeting it specifically and better subsidizing those post-secondary programs. If students can become general practitioners with less debt, the end result will be more appealing.

Alternatively, perhaps we incentivize them to this field through rebates after graduation. For every year they practice general medicine here in Alberta (whether they studied here or not), they receive a grant towards paying down their student debt. This would incent more medical graduates to move here, increasing our number of doctors, while encouraging them to stay and put down roots. More GPs means less strain on our emergency rooms and faster care for everyone. That is an investment we should be making.

We also need to work with our doctors who operate clinics to find a better pay model that focuses on patient needs. I am sure I am not the only one who goes into a clinic and feels like my pets receive a more attentive doctor. Because government has not done the work to increase the number of doctors per 1,000 people, the province restructured clinic fees to incent doctors to see patients faster.

Once we recruit more doctors per 1,000 people, we can find a better fee structure that will actually allow you to be seen like a human that needs care and attention.

Hospitals

These are critical investments. For too long hospitals have been seen as political tools to get politicians re-elected. Have you ever noticed that they only seem to get announced before an election, and then reannounced right after an election? Maybe it happens, maybe not; depending on who got elected to the area. This is wrong, and Sherwood Park knows this narrative all too well.

As a former policy advisor to an infrastructure minister, I was in the room when the minister was receiving an update on what was the South Edmonton Hospital in 2022. This hospital was a prime example of what I’m talking about. It was announced in haste by the NDP before proper planning was completed to incent people to vote for them in the 2019 election. The costs escalated from $1.8 billion to about $4.7 billion. Because a UCP MLA was not elected to the area, what happened? It was scrapped all together rather than trying to work out a solution.

As the policy advisor to the minister, I took initiative to find a solution that might work in the aggregate for the capital region. We had a proposal from the Stollery for a standalone facility, and phase 2 of the Strathcona County Community Hospital was dropped in 2013 for political reasons (after being promised for political reasons). I had the infrastructure department dust off the old blueprints for the Strathcona County building and provide estimates based on current building codes. Between the two projects, we would create about the same number of adult beds, and more beds for children in a standalone Stollery. It gets better. The cost estimate was less than the original $1.8 billion budgeted for the South Edmonton Hospital project. I put that plan together and sold the concept to MLAs, ministers, and the Premier’s Office.

In 2023’s budget, planning dollars were announced for phase 2 of the Strathcona County Community Hospital. If you don’t believe me, the link to the budget’s highlight document is here. Then the election happened and the NDP won Sherwood Park. What happened to the planning? Crickets. Now that a provincial election in coming and the UCP want to win the seat back, they finally formally announced the planning dollars just over a month ago; more than three years after the dollars were committed.

You deserve better. The solution I found with the Stollery and the Strathcona County Community Hospital is a demonstration of the problem solving I bring to the table, and the commitment I have to our community and our province. Help me make this and other projects like it happen. We need a government and elected officials that work for Albertans, not themselves.