Proposed $200M private health facility ‘a terrible project’: NDP

A proposed $200-million private surgery facility would divert public health-care dollars towards private operators at an unprecedented scale, experts and critics said Monday.

A group of lobbyists, orthopedic surgeons and a developer behind a proposal to build and operate the 270,000-square-foot contracted surgical facility in Edmonton said it has “tentative” political support from Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro for the project, the CBC reported Monday.

The facility could perform as many as 10,000 non-emergency surgeries paid for by the government, according to information obtained by the CBC.

While Shandro has not publicly endorsed the project, which still needs to go through an approval process, Shandro’s press secretary Steve Buick said in a statement the proposal appears to be in line with the government’s surgical wait times initiative.

The plan is to approve more chartered facilities to “improve outcomes for patients,” and reduce costs.

Buick said the UCP government is committed to maintaining universal, publicly-funded care.

“The claim of ‘two-tier care’ or the clinic being part of a ‘private system’ is false; this proposal is clearly about publicly funded care,” Buick said.

There are already 43 chartered surgical facilities in Alberta with contracts to provide publicly funded surgeries, a point the government has repeatedly referenced in legislature debates with the Opposition NDP.

The government’s omnibus Bill 30, which came into force July 29, streamlined the approval process for private facilities to open in Alberta and allowed for the Health Ministry to directly contract with private companies administering clinics.

But critics say the size of the proposed facility represents an exponential expansion of profit-centred health care that demands more transparency.

NDP health critic David Shepherd said in a news conference Monday it would be comparable in size to a hospital, and goes beyond existing small private surgical clinics.

While patients would not pay for services if the facility is approved and built, it would divert dollars that could be spent to improve public delivery, said Shepherd.

“This is a terrible project, it’s been a corrupt process, and we will oppose this at every step,” said Shepherd.

The proposed facility represents a major shift in the health-care sector that will be very difficult to reverse, University of Calgary health law professor Lorian Hardcastle said Monday.

“In fact, the contracts these facilities are trying to negotiate would make it near impossible to undo this after it’s happened — even following the next election,” Hardcastle said.

Patients with more complex and urgent cases might be forced to wait longer if surgeons and specialists are spending more time working in private facilities on simpler cases.

There is a shortage of many health professionals, including anesthesiologists, who might be incentivized to work on less complex but lucrative cases in the private system, said Hardcastle.

Sandra Azocar, president of advocacy group Friends of Medicare, called on the government to show Albertans a business plan that shows how it would improve patient outcomes.

“It’s a huge concern, because what is happening behind closed doors, away from any public accountability, scrutiny or oversight, is basically something that will impact each one of us down the road,” said Azocar.

Trudy Thomson, vice-president of the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, also worried the proposal and any potential contracts would lack public transparency.

Hardcastle said even Albertans who support privatization should demand a full accounting of costs, quality concerns, potential barriers to access and how much a for-profit facility might demand in public subsidies.

“If we’re going to put what doctors who are paid on a fee-for-service service basis are making from the government in gross billings, then are we also going to disclose what the investors in these private facilities are making? I’m sure the answer is no,” Hardcastle said, referring to the government’s planned Sunshine List disclosing doctor pay.

Dr. Christine Molnar, president of the Alberta Medical Association, said in a statement there is nothing inherently wrong with community-based, privately operated publicly funded care, but physicians need to know how fees would be allocated to a for-profit corporation.

The proposed facility raises several questions, including whether or not specialists would have no option but to seek employment in a private facility in order to practise their specialty, Molnar said.