Genevieve Simms

You really have to wonder about people who give themselves a 20 per cent raise when the organization they run is $1.7 billion short of what it needs to balance the books. That is indeed what the directors of the new Alberta Health Services Board, otherwise known as the super board, did on March 25.

They must have taken lessons in arrogance from the executives at AIG, the American insurance behemoth that imploded from its own greed, took billions in taxpayers’ money and then paid out exorbitant bonuses and perks to executives.

How else could the members of the super board come to believe that they are entitled to earn $50,000 a year, as well as $750 for each meeting they attend? Their chairman, Ken Hughes, earns $75,000 annually and $1,000 per meeting.

Most of these men and women have well-paying day jobs in the business sector. If they don’t want to advise a publicly funded health entity for a reasonable fee they should look elsewhere for pocket money. Perhaps they could join the board of EnCana or Nexen.

It was almost a year ago that Premier Ed Stelmach’s government decided to dismantle the nine regional health authorities in Alberta and replace their administrative functions with the super board. It’s nested in the provincial government’s Health and Wellness ministry, which is run by eagle-eyed Calgary MLA Ron Liepert, and it’s responsible for everything from hospitals to diagnostic services to physicians in every corner of the province.

Yet another re-organization in the health-care sector, we were told, would create all kinds of efficiencies that would result in better care for patients at a more reasonable cost. However, most of the 15 people appointed to the super board aren’t that experienced when it comes to providing front-line health care. One of the members lives in New Jersey and earns a living consulting for private health-care providers. The member from Red Deer is a home builder and land developer. Another member is the past president of the TSX Venture Exchange. Hughes, the chairman, is president of Alpine Insurance and Financial Inc. He was the Tory MP for High River during the Mulroney days, so he also receives a pension for his five years in office.

You can find the entire list of members on the Alberta Health and Wellness website (www.albertahealthservices.ca/board/index.html). Believe me, reading all the details will only raise more questions about why these people were chosen and why they deserve to be paid at least $50,000 a year for their advice. Jim Dinning was a volunteer chair of the Calgary Health Region. He didn’t get paid at all for the hours and hours he put in. His employer, TransAlta, was happy to subsidize his time away from the office.

The Alberta Conservatives have long believed that a business model needs to be applied to our public health-care system. They try over and over again. However, managing a complex health care system is simply not the same as running a business.

Remember when Bud McCaig, a legend in the Calgary business community, moved into the chair in the early days of the Calgary Health Region? He tried to centralize all health-care decision-making and services at the Foothills Medical Centre (FMC). The other hospitals (the ones that were left after the rest were either blown up or closed) were turned into factory-like branch plants that took their orders from FMC. It didn’t work, because hospitals are not like factories. They require on-site decision-makers capable of creating a community of caregivers who focus on patients, not the demands of head office.

Now it seems the province is trying to apply this model to the whole province. One head office run by insulated and well-paid business types who will direct the operations of hundreds of branch plant operations throughout Alberta.

Is it really any surprise that while the board has spent a year organizing itself — hiring a new executive director from Australia, approving large severance packages for the preceding board, studying fancy charts, spending $80 million on the provincewide merger — health care in Calgary is now actually harder to come by.

According to the Calgary Herald, the super board’s own figures show 50 per cent more local patients are waiting for placement in long-term care compared with last spring. At the same time, waiting lists for surgery in Calgary have grown about 18 per cent in the past year and a half. And the number of patients sleeping in hospital hallways because of bed shortages increased about 23 per cent from last year.

The Herald also reports that Calgary hospital emergency wait times were 30 per cent longer in February compared with the same month last year. Emergency patients now face a median 16.6-hour wait to be transferred to a hospital room.

In addition, the super board has discovered that operating and capital deficits from the health regions have ballooned to $1.7 billion. They gave themselves a raise anyway. That will no doubt provide great comfort to all the people waiting in emergency for 16 hours, and all the health-care workers desperately trying to look after them.