| Life in the royal kingdom of Alberta just gets weirder and weirder. Just last week our King Ralph appeared on TV screens across the nation giving away scholarships and artwork, bragging about his plans to wreck Medicare. And of course, opining about the outcome of the looming federal election. He’s betting on the Liberals to win.
Did he make any of these pronouncements in Alberta? In the legislature, which just happened to be in session as he spoke? No, King Ralph was on a royal walkabout to the eastern provinces. Not a real walkabout – Ralph doesn’t do much mixing with ordinary folks these days. He was more interested in the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) types who gather in fancy hotels for expensive lunches.
And of course, the CoC types in Toronto, Quebec City and Halifax gave him standing ovations. Why wouldn’t they? Ralph is on a rampage against Medicare. He told them it costs governments too much, so politicians of all stripes need to talk about more privatization, and more private insurance for those who can afford it.
This kind of talk goes over really well at CoC lunches. After all, the CoC was one of the main opponents of Medicare, along with the insurance industry, when it was first introduced in Canada in the 1960s. How difficult could it be for Ralph to get a standing ovation from that crowd? They practically wrote his speech.
Of course, he didn’t tell them that the kingdom of Alberta has just hired a huge U.S-based consulting/insurance company – AON – to advise them on how to offload treatments and services now covered by public health insurance onto privately purchased health care insurance. AON’s parent company recently negotiated a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement in the U.S related to fraud charges, but Ralph didn’t mention that either. Nor did he mention that AON’s president is one of the richest men in the U.S. and a key fundraiser for President George Bush. But then the CoC types probably already knew that. After all, it’s not difficult to get rich selling health care insurance, especially in the U.S.
All of this is eerily reminiscent of the strategies undertaken by Premier Ernest Manning and the insurance companies during the early days of Medicare. Manning fought Medicare tooth and nail – he even undertook a national campaign to defeat Medicare after it was introduced in Saskatchewan and then started gaining ground in other parts of the country.
He also devised a plan, with the help of the insurance companies, that came to be known as Manningcare, under which private health insurance would be made available to all Albertans by insurance companies. The Socred government promised to regulate the price and subsidize the cost of policies for those who could not afford the regulated price. Premiums kept going up anyway, and most of the people who qualified for a subsidy were too embarrassed to apply, so ended up without any coverage at all. Needless to say, a lot of money, including taxpayers’ money, was funnelled into insurance companies’ profit margins.
Albertans were paying more for health insurance than people in other provinces enrolled in Medicare, and getting less coverage. They were also forfeiting federal government funds for Medicare. But Mr. Manning held his ground. It was only after he retired in 1968 that Alberta joined the national plan. Ever his father’s son, Preston Manning is still flogging that horse on behalf of the corporate fat cats at the Fraser Institute.
And it appears Ralph wants the same thing. He calls it the Third Way, although it’s really the American Way, or the Socred Way. It’s a leap backwards, not a leap forwards. And while he called for full public debate on private health care when he was on his eastern walkabout, there is no such debate in Alberta. Instead, Ralph announced his so-called Third Way during Stampede Week, when hardly anyone was paying attention. When he had an opportunity to explain in the legislature what his reforms would really mean for Albertans, he left town.
Why is debate about health care so important on the national stage, according to Ralph, but completely absent here at home? What is Ralph really afraid of? That someone might look at the state of long-term care in this province and wonder if that’s what the government has in mind when it talks about reforming the rest of the health care system? Could Ralph’s reforms mean that we end up paying for our room, bandages, medications and meals when we need hospital care? Could Ralph’s reforms mean that the insurance industry will now be able to prey on people worried about accessing good hospital or home care, just as it preys on people who worry they may need long-term care in the future?
Or perhaps Ralph already knows that his way is going to cost individual Albertans, and the government, a lot more money – not less. For once you introduce private purchase of health care, through insurance, it becomes a seller’s market, and we will be squeezed for every penny possible.
It’s hard to imagine that King Ralph doesn’t know all this. But it would be interesting to find out just when exactly he decided to become a shill for the insurance companies. |
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