Danielle Smith defended her plan to get more bang for Alberta health care buck on her Saturday morning radio show.
On “Your Province, Your Premier,” Smith responded to a question from Marcel, a caller who said he went to Mexico to get a hip replacement due to a three-and-a-half year wait time to have the procedure done in Alberta, and asked about why the province refused to cover the cost of his Mexican surgery.
Smith said that the province was implementing an “activity-based funding” model because the data suggests it might result in reducing wait-times for people like Marcel in Alberta so that he wouldn’t have to go to Mexico to get a new hip.
“What we noticed is that the different service providers that we have , that we fund that way – the charter surgical centres – they keep doing more and more surgeries every year," Smith said.
“Five years ago, they were doing 40,000 surgeries,” she said. “Now, they’re doing over 60,000.
Meanwhile, we gave $3.5 billion to AHS (Alberta Health Services) over that same period of time,” she added, “and they’re doing fewer surgeries today than they were five or six years ago.”
Driving down costs
On Monday, Smith announced the shift to an “activity-based” funding model, which ties public funding to the number and type of procedures performed.
She said the model will drive costs down by fostering competition among public providers and those who perform publicly-funded procedures in private clinics.
“We realize what we have to do is have a hybrid model to make sure that we’re funding emergency procedures,” she said, “and the emergent issues and the overhead one way – but then, let’s reward them for doing more procedures.
“That’s how we hope to clear the backlog for hips, for knees, for eyes – for any scheduled surgeries,” she said.
On Saturday’s radio show, she explained to Marcel that the new funding model would offer a blend of services – and she even speculated about creating a “wait-time guarantee” that would finance out of province surgical procedures.
“I have contemplated whether we need to look at having a ”wait-time guarantee’” she said, “so that if you cannot get your surgery within a medically reasonable amount of time, and you have to go elsewhere to get it, that we would compensate you at the equivalent rate that we would in Alberta.
“We’ve tossed that idea around many times, but for me, I would rather fix the system – because I would rather be able to get their (surgical) care right here, in Alberta, at home, so that they can convalesce in their community with their family, and that’s what I’ve been 100 per cent focused on.”
‘Patients should be the priority’
Following Monday’s announcement, Sarah Hoffman, the Opposition NDP health critic, said while the publicly funded health-care system needs to be efficient, it shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice quality based on a quick turnover of patients.
Hoffman said the new model is about the UCP’s preference for shifting more public funding, and profits, to private surgical providers.
“Patients should be the priority - not profit margins for corporations,” said Hoffman.
On Saturday, Smith pointed to Australia, which she said implemented an activity-based funding model in its health-care system.
“The first year (that) activity-based funding was put in, it reduced (surgical) waiting lists 57 per cent,” she said.
“We’ve got to fix the system so people don’t feel like they have to leave the province to get care,” she said. “We’re spending $29 billion on the health care system!
“It is the bulk of our (provincial) tax dollar,” she said. “The system needs to work.”
With files from The Canadian Press
