HEAL OUR HOSPITALS

That Alberta hospitals spend large amounts of money comes as little surprise given the high cost of health care. But the devil is in the details and it took the digging of Postmedia reporter Keith Gerein in an in-depth investigation and a followup piece to reveal that it’s not just a case of hospitals being expensive facilities to operate by nature of their mission to heal the sick.

It’s worse; Alberta’s hospitals are set up to overspend, then to reset and repeat. They are stuck in an infinite loop of blowing past their budgets only to be awarded with more money the next fiscal year.

An analysis of financial results from 86 hospitals operated by Alberta Health Services showed that, combined, they overspent by more than $925 million in eight years.

Alberta’s hospitals are estimated to have cost nearly $10 billion last year, making it the largest expense for the government.

AHS president and CEO Verna Yiu responded, in a guest column, that the articles took hospital spending out of the wider context of overall health care, in which the authority is slowing the rate of growth for expenses with various initiatives.

But shedding light on how hospitals spend their budgets is exactly the right approach to take if the problem is ever to be solved.

One hindrance is a lack of transparency. Financial performance statistics for some Alberta hospitals used to be publicly available, but the practice stopped about 20 years ago with the amalgamation of health regions.

This lack of openness and public accountability is counterproductive. Albertans should be able to see for themselves how much a visit to the emergency room costs.

Hospital finances may not be the sexiest of health care topics, but it’s central to getting Alberta’s financial picture under control.

As Gerein’s reporting revealed, Alberta consistently ranks as one of Canada’s top per-capita spenders on health care, and statistics show much of this stems from the massive sums annually sucked up by its hospitals.

Hospital stays in Alberta are the most expensive in Canada and the province spends the highest proportion of its funding on the facilities — more than 45 per cent in Alberta versus an average of 38 per cent nationally.

There’s no single easy answer such as closing rural hospitals, private care, pay-for-performance or treating more patients at home or at clinics.

But the first step must be to acknowledge there is a problem.