Can Danielle Smith successfully overhaul Alberta’s health care?

Alberta Healthcare overhaul plan inspires at best qualified optimism Lauren great to see you again I um I’ve known Danielle Smith in fact I call her Danielle because I’ve known her since we were in college together I’ve known Premier Smith let me be more respectful for really 30 years

Um does she have the ability to take her libertarian phraser Institute free market ideas that I know she has in her heart and Implement them in real life against nurses unions and Hospital bureaucracies that hate her and hate reform well I don’t see any evidence of that in the announcement that was made

Last week about a shakeup at Alberta Health Services um as far as I can see all they have done is Chang the boxes on the org chart and some of the lines that connect the boxes but they have left the same bureaucrats in the same positions doing

The same jobs just with different titles of the organizations for which they do it for and so I I remain a skeptic this is a two-year process there was too much of an announcement made at the beginning and not enough waiting to the end they should have waited till they’d had

Consultations with nurses and doctors s and and with people in the regions of the province uh to determine what it was that needed to be shaken up but they came out last week with this brand new org chart that has four boxes where there used to be one box and they’re so

Proud of the fact that there are four boxes now and not one box and that’s going to switch it all over but if you look closely at the new org chart on instead of an overarching box called the Alberta Health Services that was looking out for everything in the

Province hospitals Extended Care Home Care all of the different types of of of Health treatments that were available medical testing etc etc now there are four boxes but there’s an under arching bureaucracy that’s supposed to ensure consistency among the four new boxes so really it it to me it I’m I’m

Unimpressed by it I really am you know it’s so hard to manage such a big thing it it really is a centrally planned economy healthc care is uh the largest program expense it’s a double digit share of the economy of course it is brutally difficult to manage it it

Reminds me of a short essay written by a French Economist and philosopher called Frederick bastiat and I haven’t read it in a while but it was basically he said the City of Paris how can people go to sleep sleep at night without being terrified that there won’t be bread the

Next morning he says how could how can all the bakeries know how much bread to order how can all the restaurants who’s in charge of delivering it how do we set the prices appropriately what kinds of bread like he just he he talks about an extremely complex system that works

Spontaneously because everyone in the system is looking out for themselves and they in this restaurant they know what the demand is like on Sundays and this Bakery knows they have to open early because of the holiday and more importantly than that there’s there’s an incentive for them to guess correctly

Right if they guess wrong they will lose profit either because they’ll end up with too much bread or too few customers because they run out of bread early so that’s the beauty of the price mechanism is that you don’t have to have it centrally planned there doesn’t have to

Be a bureaucrat charge it reminds me of of PJ oor’s assessment of why the Soviet Union fell he said people got tired of waiting in line for size nine Bulgarian shoes and and you know that that this is what we’re dealing with we’re dealing with people waiting in line for size

Nine Bulgarian shoes the only reason the Health Care system in any Province works and in Alberta as well are the people who are involved in it are able to surmount yeah the int the incredible grind of the bureaucracy and let me just close the loop on that basad thing

Because CU he basically two ideas emerged from that one is spontaneous order which is hard for us to understand that was his point oh my God you’re going to bed aren’t you worried we’re all going to starve no spontaneous order came and then he had a flip side idea

Planned chaos like imagine and and his point was there is no single person smart enough to run the bread of because you don’t know all the information you don’t know there’s a million things to know and and so I think of Danielle Smith who’s smart and but no one is

Smart enough you can’t have enough boxes in the org chart there is no thing smart I mean would you nationalize the restaurants that’s even more important than than doctors because we have to eat every day I would worry more going to bed at night if the restaurants were nationalized right that

I would wake up hungry right than I worry now when they’re all privatized and so can Danielle Smith bring some freedom I mean I’ve known her for 30 years I know she believes in libertarianism she was an intern at the Fraser Institute the year after I was so

I know she knows this stuff I think go ahead inside out she knows this stuff absolutely I I think the problem Lauren is that Alberta has such a big Surplus these days it’s politically easier just to slos a bunch of money around I mean I I let me quote from your article which

This is the line that scared me the most in your column the column’s called Alberta Healthcare overhaul plan inspires it best qualified optimism uh it’s in the Evon Sun here’s what scared me when you wrote this Lauren I am surprised but encouraged by the number of people and organizations such as the Alberta

Medical Association and Alberta Association of nurses who’ve expressed qualified support the U uh the UCP Healthcare reforms and I thought you know if the teachers union is endorsing Danielle Smith which I don’t know if they would ever do if the public sect that is terrifying to me because that’s

Not patience that’s people in the system saying we love you Danielle Smith you’re not the terrifying free market that Rachel notley warned us about you’re sloshing around billions of dollars that scares me what you wrote there the other thing I said in that column is that this

Reminds me more of a list of New Year’s resolutions you know I I should lose a little weight I should get in shape I maybe cut down on drinking a little bit and by about the 15th of January well we know where most of those end up this

Says for instance we should have 247 access to Urgent Care everywhere in the province well that’s a lovely idea but there is nothing in any of the documents they’ve put out so far that says how are you going to get a doctor in Manning Alberta which is up north of

Peace River when you can’t get one now I mean it’s lovely to say you’re going to have 247 care but you need to have probably two doctors if you’re going to have 247 care and you don’t want to wear out one of them with being on call every

Day all day long so you know where are the solutions for that what they they said in their Throne speech the week before this came out that they expect Alberta’s population will double by 2050 that will be at 10 million people will be bigger than than BC will be bigger

Than Quebec the only province that would be bigger than Alberta would be onario that’s lovely but are you going to build a lot of hospitals in the next 25 years are you going to double the admissions or triple the admissions at the medical schools and the nursing schools there

There is nothing in any of this except the these bureaucrats who are all working under AHS the one big box yeah will now be doing the same jobs in this box and this box and this box and this box I I I fail to understand what any of

This will do now there is a lot of consultation coming up if they sit down and they actually listen to Frontline workers they may get some suggestions that will be helpful but it’s the same bureaucrats who are running the consultations who’ve been running AHS and they have vested interest in staying in Power

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Sun News columnist Lorne Gunter joins The Ezra Levant Show to look at Premier Danielle Smith’s plan to overhaul Alberta’s health-care industry. So, will she be successful? With backing from the health-care unions,
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