Quote:
Originally Posted by Muta
I think its important to start moving away from the royalty teet. At some point, it had to happen. We need to start thinking long-term for the province, and start diversifying ourselves away from oil and more into other energies.
Gas tax sucks, but hey, it's still way cheaper than the $1.40 / L we were paying a couple years ago.
As for healthcare premiums - why not just implement user fees for showing up at a clinic or hospital? Too many people abuse the system by wasting our medical resources by coming in for a stubbed toe or a slight cough. Put a $20 fee on clinic / hospital visits and watch the unnecessary lineups disappear.
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At some point you know that gas is going to find its way up to that mark again and go beyond it.
I've said it before, I just don't like user fee's because for the really poor and struggling it now becomes a decision around eating or seeing a doctor. Access to health care has to be compassionate and universally allowable.
In terms of the stubbed toe and the slight cost, I would think that would come down to better triage training then anything else.
Hey I get it, I've had that frustration like crazy when I've had to go in to ER (last time was probably 20 years ago when I went I threw an irregular heart beat during flu season.
With Flash's point, respectfully, its way past due for a very deep audit into the administrative and management side of Alberta's Health Program. If there's a brier patch that needs to be looked at seriously its that.
Health Care results are far from good enough for us to not look at where the money is going. I believe that when I last looked at figures comparing provinces Alberta had one of the highest family doctor to specialist wait times at nearly 10 weeks. One of the highest waiting periods for access to technology and drug approvals, and our overall access was ranked fairly low as well.
I think in terms of value for the dollar when it came to access to personal and resources Alberta was ranked 7th in the country, and that's a very poor score when it comes to what we spend on health care.
So either we need to focus more on the front end side with the doctors and nurses. Or how we are managing our funds and our employment practices.
While I don't necessarily think that a crash budget reduction is in order, I think it does have to almost certainly have the rider that the cuts have to come more from the non front line services side of things then closing clinics reduced equipment usage etc.