Western Standard - November 09, 2023


Alberta government to dismantle AHS, focus on more timely healthcare systems

Mentioned
Ralph Klein Jordan Corey Dave
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

186.32

Word count

683

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Health care in Alberta is one of the most expensive in the country, and it's getting worse by the day. In this episode, we talk about what we need to do to improve the situation, and why we need it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know, I'm not sure I 100% agree with you about there is no better system once you get into it.
00:00:05.640 First of all, you are correct that getting into it is difficult.
00:00:09.180 Well, you're into it once you see your general practitioner who says, yes, you've got something.
00:00:14.060 I need to refer you to a specialist.
00:00:16.800 Oh, when would that be?
00:00:18.980 Next week?
00:00:19.660 Oh, no.
00:00:20.540 No, it's down the road.
00:00:21.800 No doubt.
00:00:22.040 It's going to be a long time.
00:00:23.360 And once you get to the specialist who's, you know, taking appointments for six months out, and please don't do this, ladies and gentlemen.
00:00:31.920 I know there are some of you who will be saying, six months, what are you talking about?
00:00:35.980 It was nine months from GP.
00:00:37.460 It was a year from GP to special.
00:00:39.260 We know.
00:00:40.180 I was trying to be generous.
00:00:42.160 But, you know, once you get to the specialist, well, then you're looking at another lengthy period of time.
00:00:49.640 And so there should be, I noticed that there are other countries where this is not the case.
00:00:55.400 And they're not all sort of the socialist utopias that you might expect.
00:01:01.160 Some of them are pretty hard-nosed countries where they found a way to get it done.
00:01:07.660 And that's what we need to do in Alberta is to find a way to get it done.
00:01:13.480 Yeah, and it's certainly the, it's the province's biggest expense.
00:01:17.480 And we're not getting, we're not getting any better outcomes than other jurisdictions.
00:01:23.060 I know Corey's talked about it on his show that, you know, you look over, there are other ways of doing it that seem to produce better outcomes.
00:01:30.900 Well, there certainly are.
00:01:32.420 And, you know, the one that struck me as the most likely to be effective was the one that Ralph Klein, God rest his soul, Ralph Klein did a lot of good things, but he brought in Bill 11.
00:01:43.680 The third wave.
00:01:44.760 Yeah, you know, and that meant that you couldn't start a private hospital in Alberta.
00:01:51.560 We should have opened the gates to private health care, brought them in, and then had a bidding war to get the, to get the procedures done that needed to be done. 0.99
00:02:04.380 You know, I was traveling some years ago, ended up in Jordan of all places, and driving down the street, I couldn't help noticing the hospital, hospital, clinic, clinic.
00:02:14.840 That little country has built itself up, an enviable reputation as the place to go to get treated quickly.
00:02:24.400 Jordan, you wouldn't think so, would you?
00:02:26.360 But there it was, and they drew their trade from all over the Middle East and Europe, and they've done exactly what we should have done in Alberta.
00:02:35.240 They have attracted the medical profession to come and set up right there.
00:02:40.480 And now, of course, it's...
00:02:41.880 Same thing's happened in Mexico with dental work.
00:02:44.840 Algodones.
00:02:45.700 Yes.
00:02:46.460 Right, I mean, you're just across the border, and you see nothing but dental clinics, and you see nothing but Canadians lined up in front of them.
00:02:52.660 Well, that's right, and it's not that our dental service is so bad.
00:02:56.500 I mean, you make an appointment, you go in, you get done, but it's just that it costs you three times what it costs you, and you can have a holiday for what you save on the trip to Mexico, so they tell me.
00:03:06.060 One other thing, though, Dave, sorry, what were you going to say?
00:03:08.220 I was just going to say, we've started the process, but it's like drip, drip, drip.
00:03:12.720 Where, okay, now you can go to a private clinic and get your eyes done or your knees done or your hips done, and it all gets billed back to Alberta Healthcare Services, and in theory, that should shorten the wait list for everybody else.
00:03:27.180 It doesn't seem to have cut it tremendously, but you're right.
00:03:30.700 If we'd have done what, you know, instead of Bill 11, done the opposite and attracted private hospitals, we would have been in a lot better position than we are now.