Western Standard - August 01, 2023


The UCP gets one chance to fix health care

Topics
Canada Health Act
Mentioned
Smith
MPC Daily Market Update Jul 31, 2023 Bareback Riding of a Russian Kind

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

170.58

Word count

712

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In our dominion of equals, some drive big cars, others drive little cars, and some take the bus. As long as everybody gets where they want to go, we don t pass laws to interfere with how they get there. Same with food, some have meat and some have none that want it, but there is no Canada Health Act. Health? God forbid anybody have something somebody else can t afford. That's the envy bit, and it's not a pretty sight.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 It was sad to hear Premier Smith say last week that her government stands by the principles of the Canada Health Act.
00:00:07.280 No doubt she said it for political reasons.
00:00:09.980 Heaven knows she took enough heat over private health care from the NDP on the election trail. 1.00
00:00:14.880 I signed a protocol with the federal government for 10 years committing to the principles of the Canada Health Act.
00:00:19.180 That means that you cannot charge to access insured services.
00:00:23.500 If that's what they are doing, they will be shut down, they will be fined, or we will withhold payments to them.
00:00:29.540 So it won't be allowed to happen.
00:00:31.780 But in supporting a law that outlaws private billing for insured medical services, she has wed herself to something conceived in envy and sustained in absurdity.
00:00:44.960 For in our dominion of equals, some drive big cars, some drive little cars, and some take the bus.
00:00:51.180 As long as everybody gets where they want to go, we don't pass laws to interfere with how they get there.
00:00:58.100 Same with food.
00:00:58.880 Some have meat, and some have none that want it.
00:01:02.900 But there is no Canada Food Act.
00:01:05.120 Health?
00:01:05.820 God forbid anybody have something somebody else can't afford.
00:01:09.900 That's the envy bit, and it's not a pretty sight.
00:01:12.700 But here's the absurdity of it all.
00:01:15.640 You can spend as much of your own money as you want to make yourself sick.
00:01:20.560 Beer, cigarettes, extreme sports.
00:01:22.980 But under the Canada Health Act, you may not spend a dime to make yourself better.
00:01:28.700 To be sure, not all treatments are insured.
00:01:31.980 But that itself is a further non-sense.
00:01:34.920 You can buy a beautiful smile at a high-end dentist.
00:01:38.220 You can also buy plastic surgery.
00:01:40.540 Some say, I need it.
00:01:41.580 So you can fix your face and satisfy your vanity.
00:01:44.280 But heaven help you if you try to fix something that really matters, like the nauseating pain in your hip that you must endure for months, or the one in your knee, or in your wife's hip, or your wife's knee.
00:01:56.240 These things you can't fix with your own money.
00:01:59.900 Why do we think differently with health?
00:02:01.980 Let's leave that as a rhetorical question.
00:02:05.980 Folks, this is crazy.
00:02:07.820 But that's how it is in Canada, and it's also how it is in North Korea and Cuba, by the way.
00:02:13.940 Publicly funded health care is great.
00:02:16.200 Don't get me wrong.
00:02:17.560 Most people are going to need it and use it.
00:02:20.520 But for those Albertans who can and wish to, there are three good reasons to let them buy health care in Alberta.
00:02:28.120 First, when somebody who can afford it goes to a private clinic, everybody else in the queue moves up one.
00:02:36.720 This leads to shorter wait times.
00:02:39.680 Second, no offense to the good folks across the border, but if somebody is bound and determined to drop $50,000 on surgery, why not keep their business here?
00:02:49.100 Build more private clinics and have them compete for Alberta's medical business.
00:02:55.020 Third, we're already doing private health care for workers' compensation, the RCMP, and the armed services, all of whom have privileged access to the medical system and whose employers are billed separately.
00:03:07.400 No problem with that, by the way.
00:03:09.000 But we're also doing it for people out of province.
00:03:11.420 If you're from BC or anywhere else in Canada, you're welcome to buy medical services here in Alberta.
00:03:17.000 And as an Albertan, you can book private surgery anywhere else in Canada, just not in your own home province of Alberta.
00:03:24.120 It's the same with all the provinces.
00:03:26.240 If you live in BC, we can fix you up here in Alberta and send the bill.
00:03:30.420 All quite legal and all quite unacceptable.
00:03:34.360 You would never design things this way.
00:03:37.560 Alberta will never have superb health care as long as it limits private enterprise and health.
00:03:42.880 What we have is adequate, but often only available after weights that put us into a third world league of comparison.
00:03:49.300 There's no doubt this is a tough one for the UCP, but they are at the start of a four-year term.
00:03:54.880 If they're keen on making the system work as they say they are, there won't be a better time to start than right now.
00:04:01.560 Thank you so much.