Letter: Albertans deserve better health care now
By Letter to the Editor on February 22, 2025.
More than half a million Albertans don’t have a family doctor, stressed families are waiting for hours in the emergency room with sick children and frail seniors are living in pain for months, or even years, awaiting much-needed surgery. We expect our government to be urgently working to address these pressing health-care issues. But what have Premier Danielle Smith and her government been doing for the health of Albertans? Since coming into power, they have hired and fired four different CEOs of Alberta Health Services, paying an estimated $2 million in severance for them not to work. The government has dismissed two AHS boards of directors, including one appointed under Smith’s leadership. And most recently, Alberta’s auditor general Doug Wylie has announced he will be reviewing procurement and contracting practices within AHS and the Health Ministry. He is responding to allegations of government interference and potential conflict of interest in multimillion-dollar deals to buy medications and personal protective equipment, and in awarding expensive private surgical contracts. These allegations have not been proven in court. While this flurry of newsworthy activity is going on, in the background more expensive structural changes are underway to dismantle Alberta’s health-care system. Our unified health-care system was the object of envy for other Canadian provinces such as Nova Scotia and Manitoba, who are using our previous health-care system as an example to reform their own. At the same time, our government is taking a high-functioning single health authority and replacing it with a bureaucratic and fragmented system that fixes none of the problems that everyday Albertans face. At best, the government is out of touch with the health-care needs of Albertans, and why they were voted into power. At worst, they are interested in concentrating power in their own hands, and rewarding supporters and friends. What do we need to do as citizens to redirect the attention of our government to matters that will make a positive difference in our lives? For one, we should be shouting from the rooftops that the voting public will not tolerate wasteful political and bureaucratic exercises paid from public coffers. We need to contact our MLAs and call for an independent public inquiry into how multimillion-dollar medical contracts were awarded by AHS and the Health Ministry. Most importantly, we need to be asking our government to increase recruitment and retention of health-care workers, train more nurses and primary care providers and boost the capacity of publicly funded hospitals to provide high-quality and timely surgeries. Our politicians have been elected to improve health-care access, quality and timeliness for Albertans, and we need to remind them of their duty. It is time to send the message to our government that we see what they are doing and it is not what we elected them to do. Vamini Selvanandan is a rural family physician and public health practitioner in Alberta. For more articles like this, visit http://www.engagedcitizen.ca. 8-7
When , as a Royal Bank Manager, I was helping nine doctors and about two dozen nurses relocate out of this province when Klein was treating them so badly one of the doctors said it best.
“ why should I stay in Alberta and support my patients, when my patients have refused to support me against this tyrant Ralph Klein “. So why have you fools supported these Reformers and ignored how they were treating our doctors, nurses, teachers and students, and all the rest of us?
Klein’s father Phil said to me “ Al what in the hell is the matter with that son of mine? While he gives away billions in oil royalties he is forcing us to try to live without a proper healthcare system. This will cost some people their lives “. Phil was right thats exactly what it did and it still is and will only get worse. Klein’s daughter Angie was encouraging Albertans to vote NDP so was so disgusted by what her father was doing to us, but ignorant Albertans, mostly seniors, refused to listen to her either.
You have created a hell of a mess for all of us and destroyed our children in grandchildren’s future, I hope you’re proud?
Good points in this letter. We still haven’t recovered from Ralph Klein’s senseless cuts to the public healthcare system in Alberta. Ralph Klein closed down hospitals, got other hospitals demolished, and underfunded the existing hospitals in Alberta. Many nurses were laid off.
The UCP made matters worse. This was done in numerous ways. When the NDP were in power, they were getting a beneficial superlab built for Alberta, and when the UCP came to power, they wasted a lot of money scrapping the beneficial superlab that the NDP started to get built. Edmonton was going to get a badly needed new hospital built, when the NDP were in power, and the UCP stopped that, after they came into power. The NDP rectified the problems with DynaLife, and when the UCP came into power, they reversed those changes, and made it worse. After the UCP realized they were wrong, the UCP blew around $100 million on the DynaLife debacle, which the UCP caused. The UCP blew $80 million on Turkish Tylenol, which couldn’t even be used. The UCP blew $253,000 and $2 million on Preston Manning to produce a covid report that is junk. The UCP have also blown $2 million and added costs on others to produce another very bad pandemic management report for Alberta. The UCP hired many more of their Conservative crony friends to help dismantle AHS, which will solve nothing. The UCP have also treated medical professionals in Alberta with disdain.
You have nailed, yet these mindless seniors continue to support these fools totally ignorant of what they are doing to us seniors and literally putting our lives at risk if we can’t get medical help when we need it.
On one of my 8 trips to the hospital and 4 operations over 4 years, in 2018 I had a roommate. He had cancer and was a farmer who lived 2 and 1/2 hours from Edmonton. On 4 occasions he was told to come to Edmonton to have his operation. Him and his wife came to Edmonton the night before, rented a hotel room so he could be at the hospital by 6am and on 3 occasions when he got there he was told to go home and wait to be called back again, they had a doctor , nurse or bed shortage and they couldn’t operate. On the 4th time he was admitted and the next day they came to our room to get him at 6am and I wished him well. He was back in no time. They had cut him open and the cancer had spread so badly they couldn’t do anything for him. A short time later his wife, daughter and son showed up bawling their eyes out. Their 17 year son told me that there was no way he could run the farm and still go to school. I often wonder what happened to them.