The United Conservative Party is taking a major step towards decimating Alberta’s public health care. Recently, Alberta premier Danielle Smith announced her government’s plan to transfer hospitals away from Alberta Health Services (AHS).
Her plan is to set up a system by which the government owns hospitals but leases them out to providers. Thus, private firms will be given the right to compete with AHS.
For example, Smith is in the process of transferring the Drayton Valley hospital to Covenant Health, a Catholic health care provider which notably refuses to provide contraceptives, abortions, and end-of-life services to its “clients”.
Smith argues that “if our operator [AHS] isn’t performing the services we need them to, we’re going to take [the hospitals] back.” Crucially, however, she will make it near impossible for AHS to properly perform these services: in the near future, she plans to split the service into four separate bureaucracies, which will cause chaos when attempts to coordinate health care services are made. We can be sure that the ruling conservatives will then “make up” for this confusion with more cuts to public funding.
Already, publicly run and owned imaging services have been contracted to private firms—only to be de-privatized due to poor service.
Further, Smith has pioneered the establishment of chartered surgery facilities, which have failed to deliver on the promise to provide more surgeries for Albertans.
One only need look at the United States’ privatized system, with the lowest life expectancy of any western country, fueled by $220 billion of medical debt, to see that “competition” in health care means only firms competing over who can profit the most out of the ill-health and death of the workers.
The lie Smith repeats about how privatization will lead to superior service is only a front for her attack on the Albertan working class. The capitalist cronies behind the UCP see the ongoing crisis of their system and want the workers to pay for it—in this case, in the doctor’s office and hospital.
It is imperative that Albertan workers stand up against these deadly austerity measures. But in order to end the source of these attacks, it is equally crucial that workers organize to end the very system which places profits over lives—capitalism.
