Alberta Health-Care Workers Told To Shut Up

[SebC]

Originally Posted by automaton 3

Nehkara, I sincerely hope your job is safe.

The Province is bleeding red ink, and the Alberta health-care budget is enormous at 10.8 billion - which is apparantly the highest per capita spending in Canada.

I attended a talk a few years ago in Edmonton, and the figures there showed that in terms of "bang vs. bucks spent", Alberta's health-care performance was miserable in comparision to other Provinces, and other countries.

Any thoughts as to why that is the case...I'm genuinely curious.

Because cost of everything is higher here, you need to pay people more?

It also doesn't help that every time there's a cabinet shuffle some new guy comes in with his own ideas and none of the experience that the previous guy had. He's also a guy who worked his way up to the job through the PC party, instead of through the health care system.

Of course, that's applicable to every province and every department... so whilst it may explain why we get poor bang for the buck it doesn't explain our performance relative to other provinces. The first bit does though.

[wooohooo]

Rerun,
I read your stories and it sucks you and your wife had to go through such an ordeal.

There's a fact that health care is going to be very expensive. For a patient getting tests done you have - Nurses and Doctors who work through out the day and many work extremely long OT. Then you have to pay for the Lab tests done, the technicians, management staff. After that, all the bedding/clothing needs to be washed and cleaned. Needles and medicine needs to be administered. Medicine is very expensive let's not forget. If you're in worse shape and need something surgically done - well now you have a couple surgical nurses and surgeons working on you for a few hours.

There is no easy fix as there is no way around the expensive health care costs. We can get more money, pay for more Doctors, nurses, technicians etc. But then you run into the fact that there's no more beds and a new hospital needs to be built. To run a hospital you need lots of staff, and very, very expensive machines. These costs are pretty much exponential.

What we need to do is have a better form of Privatized and Public health care. How we do that? Well I have no idea

[joe_mullen]

except the fact that every other province has a provincial sales tax to make up for it. you can't paint it any other way, getting rid of health premiums was a colossal mistake, just like the federal government cutting the GST. just stupid ploys to get votes.

Originally Posted by Rerun

It just puts us in line with every other province in Canada.