Is O’Toole plan for health care from Alberta’s playbook?

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s comments about how a government led by him would improve public health care seem designed to evade the whole truth about what Canadians can expect when they need a family physician, surgery, long-term care or a visit to ER.

O’Toole has said he believes in both “innovation” by the private sector, what he calls “public-private synergies,” and universal access to public health care, meaning no one would have to pay out of their own pocket to get the care they need.

But that sounds just like the pitch Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is making as he barges ahead and opens up parts of the public system to private investors and corporations, even as the pandemic stretches health-care workers and resources dangerously thin.

The Kenney approach has public money being funnelled into surgical clinics, diagnostic imaging, laboratories and testing facilities that are owned and operated by various private investors, who expect to earn a return on their investment.

So, yes, there will be universal access; a patient just has to show her health-care card to get whatever service she needs.

But where is all that public money actually going? How transparent is the contract awarding process and the contracts themselves? What oversight is government going to provide to make sure patients are receiving a high standard of care? And doesn’t expecting a profit mean higher costs than in the public system?

A prime example of this approach is the Alberta government’s arrangement with Telus, Canada’s second largest telecom company, to provide an app that Albertans can use for a virtual consultation with a physician. A virtual walk-in clinic, although the attending physicians might be in another province far from the patient’s network of community resources.

Alberta’s health minister, Tyler Shandro, breathlessly announced the partnership early in the pandemic as a way for homebound people to get in touch with a doctor. But it was soon discovered that the Telus docs were getting paid more per virtual visit than doctors in Alberta who were bypassing the Telus app and virtually consulting with their patients using whatever technology was available to them in their clinics.

The fees were adjusted after Alberta doctors loudly complained. But we never did find what kind of remuneration or benefit Telus gets from this arrangement. How much public money went to Telus for this service and shouldn’t that information be easily accessible?

And despite the pandemic, the Kenney government was quick to pass legislation that permits the health minister to enter into agreements with “corporations” and to establish alternative relationship plans with physicians who would bypass fee scales negotiated through the Alberta Medical Association.

This is all in preparation for establishing small, privately owned hospitals focused on complicated surgeries, such as hip and knee replacements. Kenney claims it will be faster, cheaper, more efficient and will reduce wait times, although he doesn’t present any data to back that up.

Besides, that has already been tried in Calgary during the Klein era and it was a disaster.

The health authority ended up paying 10 per cent more for surgeries it had contracted to the private facility than it paid in its own hospitals.

When the place went into receivership, the health authority had to pay the receivership fees to keep it going because it didn’t have enough operating capacity in its own hospitals.

And the government has yet to explain where all the physicians and nurses needed to staff these private facilities are going to come from. Alberta is so short of nurses as the pandemic’s fourth wave hits hospitals that contract nurses are being brought in from other provinces at a higher pay rate than local nurses receive.

In one of the extensive reviews of the health-care system commissioned by the UCP, it was suggested that Alberta Health Services sell off all its non-profit long-term-care facilities to for-profit providers. Given the disastrous record of for-profit long-term-care facilities during the pandemic, this would be nothing short of reckless.

O’Toole hasn’t offered much clarity about what Canadians can expect from their cherished public health care system if he becomes prime minister.

But so far it sure sounds like he has been looking to Jason Kenney for ideas.