Danielle Larivee, a vice-president at the United Nurses of Alberta, said nurses are “very alarmed” by hospital transfers she said could negatively affect care and drive critical health-care workers from the province.
Like Parks, Larivee said the worry is the restructuring will lead to more bureaucracy and less co-ordination across the system.
“We’re not seeing any evidence at all to support the idea that this is about improving access to care, about improving services or even about saving money,” said Larivee in an interview.
“If we’re not saving money and not making care better, why are we doing it?”
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There should be a special place in hell for people who privatize public services
(Edit: And separate from abstract issues with privatization, we already know that the new healthcare administrator Smith wants to bring in specifically excludes - for religious reasons - reproductive care (for women) like birth control and abortions. That’s right. We’re rolling back our clocks about a 100 years on the separation of church and state. And with healthcare being a provincial mandate - will Albertans whose local healthcare is under the new Christian and/or Catholic administration be able to drive across provincial lines for birth control or an abortion? It’s hard to believe these might be relevant questions IN CANADA in the next few years)
I see a few reasons for this bullshit.
- The conservative masturbatory fantasy of privatizing all government services, leaving the risk and cost to the government and collecting the profits for themselves and their friends
- The desire to punish people for being sick and “poor” (Really, just not extremely wealthy.) Being sick and being poor are both symptoms of being a Bad Person who made Bad Choices in their fascist eyes.
- Most urgently right now, this is a huge step towards banning abortion, gender care, birth control, and fertility treatments. In other words, subjugating women.
That’s why I call Marlaina “Taliban Dan.” It’s not just the same playbook as the conservative US states, it’s straight out of Iran.
This is the agenda of the Conservative government, nobody should be surprised by this. The fact that people vote for these clowns is mind boggling. Better buckle up, because this is what is going to continue happening across Canada when the federal conservatives win the next election. People have incredibly short memories.
Earlier this month, Smith told a United Conservative Party town hall in Drayton Valley, Alta., that she will look to transfer authority in some cases in an effort to create competition and “fear” among providers.
The policy shift would be part of a bigger plan first announced last year by Smith to dismantle Alberta Health Services, or AHS, the provincial authority tasked with delivering front-line care.
🤦♂️
What she knows and they don’t is that there is never competition between commercial providers of healthcare. America’s been trying that experiment for years.
What it gets - since there is never enough healthcare - is massive disparity in public and private services (if any public ones are left) based on your HMO’s ability to pay.
This is a challenge to our charter.