Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Thanks for proving my point. I didn't think it would happen so quickly or succinctly.

Well to me, it's the age-old question of whether the party wants to be elected, or be right. The NDP clearly, would rather be right. And, you know what? Kudos to them, if that's their goal.

They could've won an election and implemented this, making legitimate change in the province, but to each their own. One day, they might still be able to get on their high-horse and say "See! You should've done it our way!"

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well to me, it's the age-old question of whether the party wants to be elected, or be right. The NDP clearly, would rather be right. And, you know what? Kudos to them, if that's their goal.

They could've won an election and implemented this, making legitimate change in the province, but to each their own. One day, they might still be able to get on their high-horse and say "See! You should've done it our way!"

My point is, the right wing media and the UCP lied about the supposed tax increase and fooled people into believing it would have any negative effect on them. I mentioned it before, but a small business owner was interviewed by CBC and said she couldn't support the NDP for their business tax increase because it would hurt her.

The UCP and media also regularly lie about carbon taxes and their costs. They make any tax discussion impossible becuase they don't operate in the realm of facts. How can we discuss properly funding healthcare when one side sabotages any discussion before it can begin?

[Leondros]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

"Talbot-Jones told CBC that because of high overhead and growing pressures, she and other clinics have considered exploring new economic models.
"A lot of doctors are facing bankruptcy in their clinics," the doctor said. "I follow Facebook groups where lots of doctors all over the country, they're all seeing the same thing.""

Exactly what I suspected.

The docs don't want to do this, but they have to make themselves profitable.

The current model for family docs is failing, and the government isn't doing enough to ensure it is a stable and funded area of medicine.

This has nothing to do with ideological motives for privatization of healthcare, it is reactionary and intended to cope with the exist anemic model of funding, bill codes, and operational support.

This is all on the current government.

We have 5 friends who are GP's in Calgary - 3 of which are at different clinics and are owners. None are even close to facing bankruptcy. In fact, one just bought his dream car for over $200K. Either these doctors are horrible business people (which is entirely possible given they didn't go to business school, they went to med school), or she is purposefully hyperbolic for this news story.

[MoneyGuy]

Originally Posted by Cain

I'm not well versed in it at all, but I always thought that OAS was meant as a safety net, so if people taking home that much money yearly are still getting payouts it seems poorly thought out. Agree that it is hard to retract something like that though, if anything has been well proven it is that people are generally quite selfish/short sighted.

That’d be the GIS.

[Ashartus]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well to me, it's the age-old question of whether the party wants to be elected, or be right. The NDP clearly, would rather be right. And, you know what? Kudos to them, if that's their goal.

They could've won an election and implemented this, making legitimate change in the province, but to each their own. One day, they might still be able to get on their high-horse and say "See! You should've done it our way!"

I admire a party actually having the guts to say you can't have all the benefits of higher spending without higher taxes to go with it, but it was political suicide because voters want the good stuff without the bad. I think they felt they had to make a case that they could keep their promises without running deficits and tried to present a costed platform, but when push comes to shove a lot of voters would rather see deficits than tax increases (even if they say they don't want deficits).

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Perhaps reclaiming it through death taxation would work well? If you claim OAS and die with assets(over a certain amount), the government reclaims all OAS payments at your death. If you don't want that, you can opt out of the payments.

Yeah, that's what Medicaid does sometimes in the US.

Though it would require changing how a lot of things work in Canada, as otherwise people could just liquidate their assets and transfer them to whoever before they die. So we'd need to have some kind of gift tax, which is normally also tied in with estate taxes (gifted amounts normally reduce your estate tax exemption). That'd be a pretty radical change from how things are done now, where we rely on deemed dispositions and capital gains to tax estates.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

My point is, the right wing media and the UCP lied about the supposed tax increase and fooled people into believing it would have any negative effect on them. I mentioned it before, but a small business owner was interviewed by CBC and said she couldn't support the NDP for their business tax increase because it would hurt her.

The UCP and media also regularly lie about carbon taxes and their costs. They make any tax discussion impossible becuase they don't operate in the realm of facts. How can we discuss properly funding healthcare when one side sabotages any discussion before it can begin?

Right, so you have to know that's coming? Instead of dealing with that issue properly though, they rolled out that 42% tax increase and lost the election. It's just purely inept. You can say it's somehow the UCP's fault, but at the end of the day it was just an incredibly dumb decision and cost them the election.

[Regorium]

Originally Posted by Ashartus

I admire a party actually having the guts to say you can't have all the benefits of higher spending without higher taxes to go with it, but it was political suicide because voters want the good stuff without the bad. I think they felt they had to make a case that they could keep their promises without running deficits and tried to present a costed platform, but when push comes to shove a lot of voters would rather see deficits than tax increases (even if they say they don't want deficits).

Prentice tried that with the look in the mirror comment and got immediately destroyed for it.

I agree with Slava. Lying to the electorate, then getting in power and implementing your agenda is the best way to go to get anything done.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Regorium

Prentice tried that with the look in the mirror comment and got immediately destroyed for it.

I agree with Slava. Lying to the electorate, then getting in power and implementing your agenda is the best way to go to get anything done.

Maybe not lying flat-out, but don't give any ammunition. Then you get in power and say "well, when we got a look at the mess those guys had made, we had no choice to take this action!"

Look no further than the UCP with their "we're not campaigning on this" and then they get in power and the first thing they do is start looking at a provincial pension, provincial police and whatever other separatist things they have.

[Yoho]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1683930366707658753

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I’m in the reform the system and throw more money at it camp. I’m also in what I would imagine is a small minority of voters would be okay with increasing the GST to 10 per cent and introducing a 5 per cent PST to pay for it.

I believe Canadian voters have demonstrated that they’re unwilling to be taxed at the rates required to fund the increasing demands of public health care. What I don’t believe is that the capacity crisis is due to governments with sinister agendas deliberately starving the public system.

I strongly feel that the current system can be fixed but it is going to take some think outside the box solutions that go beyond increasing taxes, even if that may inevitably be necessary as well.

I’m probably asking for trouble here but I’d be interested to hear peoples opinions on an idea I was discussing with a friend recently.

I basically looked at the current situation and it comes down to most would agree a good public healthcare system needs to be accessible to all but there are also some people who could afford to pay for services in exchange for receiving them sooner and are frustrated that they can’t.

Simply privatizing certain services in my opinion would do little to improve access for those who can’t afford it as even if it did hypothetically have some impact on wait times in the public health system those small(if any) gains would slowly erode over time as the population grows.

This got me thinking about a potential compromise by using the existing public health system and allowing for a very small percentage of all surgeries to be paid for by the patient in order to move up the queue so that that money can be reinvested in public healthcare without taking anything away from the existing system.

Basically in a nutshell (and to be clear this is a very basic napkin math theory that would require more data on the total number of surgeries, costs, etc.. to truly determine its viability) the concept is that you identify which kinds of, for example, surgery centres we need to fund in order to create more capacity for our system and pay for them by charging people who would voluntarily pay for services that would otherwise have been covered by AHS in exchange for them receiving those services sooner.

So for example if a new surgery centre costs $200M to build, you take maybe 1 or 2 percent of all surgeries(almost 300k in Alberta last year according to some very fast research) being currently provided and offer those to patients who are willing to pay a large premium to receive that service sooner. (Ordinarily I’d use the express charge them an arm and a leg for it but that doesn’t seem appropriate in this context.)

Again these are just simplified examples but if you could get say $10k-$20k premium for 3000 surgeries annually that’s $30M-$60M in additional revenue, maybe even more if people are willing to pay more. That can go a long way in getting a lot of new facilities built in a hurry with the trade off being potentially reducing the total number of surgeries available to all in the public system by less than 2% in the short term, but not reducing the amount of overall surgeries performed. If nobody is willing to pay those premiums for faster service then it’s a pretty good indication that they don’t want to pay for private healthcare costs anyways so we can look at just increasing funding to the public system. Worse case scenario if nobody want to pay those premiums you can still fill those appointments with people in the existing public health queue.

It’s admittedly a far from a perfect solution. It would absolutely cause some short term pain in that some folks would need to wait a little longer for surgeries but in the long run once you increase capacity by greater than what it was initially reduced by you can continue to use this system as an additional revenue stream for improving the overall system. Personally I think people would accept the short term pain if there is a guaranteed real benefit in the form of new facilities and greater capacity to the overall public healthcare system coming from it down the road.

[Ozy_Flame]

10% HST would be great. Still cheaper than BC, Ontario and Quebec.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Slava

Right, so you have to know that's coming? Instead of dealing with that issue properly though, they rolled out that 42% tax increase and lost the election. It's just purely inept. You can say it's somehow the UCP's fault, but at the end of the day it was just an incredibly dumb decision and cost them the election.

And there you go, part of the problem. Deceptive stuff that does nothing to further the conversation, and you are just (poorly) repeating the UCP's nonsense of it being a 38% increase(not 42). It was a 3% increase in the corporate tax rate and a cutting of small business tax. But the fact you even discuss it in that manner shows the UCP have succeeded in their BS. So congrats?

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Slava

Maybe not lying flat-out, but don't give any ammunition. Then you get in power and say "well, when we got a look at the mess those guys had made, we had no choice to take this action!"

Look no further than the UCP with their "we're not campaigning on this" and then they get in power and the first thing they do is start looking at a provincial pension, provincial police and whatever other separatist things they have.

And then you get people saying "I can't vote for the NDP becuase they didn't campaign on a carbon tax," which is exactly what happened. Telling the truth doesn't work, and tricking voters doesn't work.

[MRCboicgy]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'm just here for 2 back to back posts calling them the party.

And you know a little something about back-to-back posts

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by MRCboicgy

And you know a little something about back-to-back posts

It's not like I post in triplicate or something!

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

And there you go, part of the problem. Deceptive stuff that does nothing to further the conversation, and you are just (poorly) repeating the UCP's nonsense of it being a 38% increase(not 42). It was a 3% increase in the corporate tax rate and a cutting of small business tax. But the fact you even discuss it in that manner shows the UCP have succeeded in their BS. So congrats?

I didn't bother to go look at the actual increase, so guilty as charged there. But regardless, they knew what was coming in the campaign against them and decided to roll all in on the tax hike. I have no idea how you could see that and think it was a good strategy.

[belsarius]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

And then you get people saying "I can't vote for the NDP becuase they didn't campaign on a carbon tax," which is exactly what happened. Telling the truth doesn't work, and tricking voters doesn't work.

In regards to the carbon tax, it wasn't even lying, it is just stupid people. They campaigned on setting up a qualified committee to give them the direction to take in regards to dealing with carbon. It wasn't sure during the election if that would be a carbon tax, or a cap and trade arrangement, but the NDP were clear that they were going to do something about it, and that they were going to rely on experts from various specialties to give them that guidance.

Anyone who tries to claim "NDP didn't campaign on the carbon tax so they shouldn't have implemented it" is either an idiot or willfully ignorant.

[chedder]

This is pretty funny, especially the comments. The Marda Loop doctor who says her clinic could go broke talking about her 911.

https://twitter.com/TheBreakdownAB/s...Jfy-WyG9w&s=19

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It's not like I post in triplicate or something!

Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.