Western Standard - August 29, 2024


Premier Smith needs support to break the healthcare monopoly

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Ralph Klein Nahid Nenshi Corey
Strathcona County Gets a Boost： High-Speed Internet Expansion Announced by Minister Glubish Alberta’s First Quarter Fiscal Update for 2024-25

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

164.44

Word count

973

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we talk about Alberta's new premier, Danielle Smith, and her plan to privatize the province's health care system. We also talk about the hypocrisy of the left when it comes to the idea of privatizing health care in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Premier Smith spoke at a town hall and apparently the world's going to end.
00:00:03.820 Apparently it is. I think I saw Naheed Nenshi crying in the street as I drove to work today.
00:00:10.100 Yeah, it didn't come as a surprise. I think Daniel Smith campaigned on she was going to shake up AHS.
00:00:16.920 She was going to change it. And she talked at a town hall this week about basically getting AHS out of the hospital business
00:00:25.400 and getting private operators or, you know, existing operators like Covenant Health to take it over.
00:00:33.000 And of course, the left predictably lost their minds and, you know, the end of the world is nigh.
00:00:41.040 But, you know, you know, you've talked about this ad nauseum.
00:00:45.800 Every health care system in Canada is provincially is broken.
00:00:50.760 We're going to get scads and scads of dough and the productivity is not improving at all.
00:00:57.500 It's getting it's getting worse.
00:00:59.520 Whereas you look around the world and other countries do things differently and things change.
00:01:05.500 But any mention of privatized health care in this country and people lose their mind.
00:01:10.700 Well, let's just back check on that quickly.
00:01:12.500 You know, before we get to it, I saw the head and then she's NDP leaders statement.
00:01:17.400 He said outright on his ex posting, Daniel Smith is going to privatize hospitals.
00:01:22.100 Let's call it out right now. That's absolute a lie.
00:01:24.740 And it's BS. But it shows desperation on the part of Alberta's NDP.
00:01:28.660 I mean, whatever Smith may be doing, it may be a good idea.
00:01:30.960 It may be a bad idea.
00:01:32.620 But she's not privatizing hospitals.
00:01:34.640 Is this where the discourse is going to go from here on?
00:01:36.660 Well, I probably will.
00:01:38.240 I mean, we've seen lots of political campaigns where one side tries to tar the other side unfairly and inaccurately.
00:01:47.620 She is I actually kind of wish she was trying to privatize the hospitals, you know, that would suit me a lot better.
00:01:54.540 But what I think she's trying to do is change the incentives at every level. 0.54
00:01:58.520 I mean, just this is what you would have, what you could have with a with a different way of administering hospitals.
00:02:04.860 Let's say that the that the money followed the patient instead of instead of a hospital saying, well, there's a million people.
00:02:11.540 So you get a per capita grant times one million at that.
00:02:15.760 When it's like that, every patient is a cost.
00:02:18.520 I don't really want to see you.
00:02:20.400 On the other hand, if if the money followed the patient and if you went to this hospital, this hospital is the one that got paid.
00:02:28.500 But if you went to that hospital, that would be the hospital.
00:02:32.800 Which hospital do you think is going they're both going to be good Lord?
00:02:37.620 They'd have the hospital administrator out the back calling in camps to get people into their own emergency room. 0.61
00:02:43.920 You know, I'm being flippant, but the incentives matter.
00:02:47.820 And so the incentives in in the existing Alberta health services have produced a large fat bureaucracy which gets fed no matter what happens on the ground floor.
00:03:06.200 And if you put this out to a bit, a slimmer administration will probably probably have a good chance of producing a better result for less money.
00:03:23.020 Now, they will have their problems.
00:03:24.640 They will have the problems that you were talking about in your column with unions that are obviously going to try and protect their own turf.
00:03:35.980 It's great when you can get an hour's wages for taking a 15 minute phone call at home.
00:03:41.580 The kind of things that the contracts allow, they're going to have to fight with that.
00:03:45.580 Well, OK, we'll see what they do with it.
00:03:49.120 But the idea of changing the incentives in order to save money, absolutely valid.
00:03:56.020 Absolutely.
00:03:56.660 I thought Corey raised a very good point in his show earlier today about the hypocrisy of the left.
00:04:02.260 When you look at the facility the Enoch Nation is building near Edmonton, 3,000 operations a year.
00:04:10.380 I think you said that they do orthopedic surgeries a year.
00:04:15.580 It's basically a privatized hospital, but because it's on indigenous ground, the left doesn't say a thing.
00:04:22.300 But if it was planned for downtown Calgary, there'd be masses of, you know, they'd be protesting the building.
00:04:27.620 Well, this idea has been around for quite a long time.
00:04:29.420 It's actually putting hospitals on the reserves.
00:04:32.000 And it's interesting that it happened first in Edmonton.
00:04:35.300 I always thought that it would be down here at the Satina Reserve, you know.
00:04:39.060 They've been very entrepreneurial.
00:04:41.280 Anyway, maybe there's one in the works.
00:04:42.600 But when this province has got a number of private hospitals on reserves if necessary,
00:04:53.660 and you can say we have these procedures to do, let's have your bids,
00:04:59.240 you will find that the competition will bring down the price.
00:05:02.880 And more important, more important to the people who need the operations is it'll be quicker.
00:05:08.960 They are going to build the capacity to meet the demand.
00:05:14.880 I dream, if I dream at all about health care, and, you know, praise God, I've never had to experience it.
00:05:21.520 But, you know, if I dreamt about health care, I would dream about having a constellation of hospitals in Alberta
00:05:28.220 to which people were coming from all over the country, even from overseas.
00:05:31.940 Medical tourism is a real thing in some countries. 0.99
00:05:34.820 It could be in Alberta, but we have that stupid Bill 11 that Ralph Klein, 0.72
00:05:38.740 the worst thing that Ralph Klein did back in 2002 that makes it actually illegal to put a private hospital in Alberta. 0.81
00:05:46.500 The only workaround is what we're talking about, which we go on the reserve and you put the building there.
00:05:51.960 Nobody can say a thing.
00:05:53.020 Thank you.