Laying it Out: Yes, Virginia, there is a health-care cut

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on December 7, 2019.

If I gave you $1,000 to care for 100 people, you could spend $10 per person. If next year I give you $1,050 to care for 110, you could spend $9.54. That’s how a population increase can turn a budget increase into a cut.

If the cost of one person is $10 and I give you $1,000, you could care for 100 people. If next year a person costs $11 and I give you $1,050, you could care for 95.4. That’s how inflation can turn a budget increase into a cut.

If both scenarios occur at the same time, 110 people will need care at a cost of $11 per person. If you need $1,210 and I give you $1,050, I have cut your funding.

This is how math works.

The only way to claim my position as anything but a cut is to revolve my argument around semantics and constantly tell you to, “Look at my budget. I used to give you $1,000 and now I give you $1,050. That’s an increase, so stop the fear mongering!”

Welcome to Premier Jason Kenney’s Alberta, where there is absolutely – inarguably – a health-care budget cut occurring while he goes on softball radio shows with softball hosts who ask softball questions to declare it an increase. For a man who discusses cutting per-capita spending as much as he does, you’d think he’d have the bravado to admit he’s doing the exact thing he promised.

So if cutting spending is mathematically what he’s doing, and Albertans elected him to do just that, why skirt the issue with health care using doubled-down misleading speech? Why not own the cuts?

Could it be that front-line health-care cuts are historically unpopular, and he knows his cuts are going to affect front-line services?

Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes says much of the savings should come from management, or in his eloquent words, “managers managing managers.” Except, while Alberta is the second highest province for per-capita health spending, its administrative costs are 0.6 per cent of overall health dollars – well below national average – and physicians and hospitals (which include nurses) combine at more than 60.

I’ll believe a world where Barnes hasn’t crunched the numbers, but you can bet your next surgery that Kenney and Health Minister Tyler Shandro have. Kenney knows any cut is going to come out of health’s biggest expenditure, and despite rhetoric about “protecting front-line services,” it’s hard to get more front-line than hospitals and doctors.

Maybe you think spending less on doctors, nurses and hospitals is great because those folks are “overpaid anyway.” As Finance Minister Travis Toews has said before, if they’d just take a salary cut, job losses could be minimized, and frankly, many Albertans would prefer doctors and nurses suffer right along with everyone else.

But even if equal-opportunity hardship was a thing we should ever knowingly subscribe to (shoot me an email anytime to explain that one), there are clear cause-and-effect issues with that mindset.

First, cutting income comes with an economic ripple effect, especially when it’s thousands of jobs that pay pretty well. Doctors making less money will be fine, but even a small recession of their personal spending will hit the economy, and that hit will be felt somewhere, by someone, because that’s how economics work. And for nurses who lose their jobs, any not ready to retire are most assuredly going to leave the province altogether, because those who study to be a nurse tend to want to be a nurse.

All that money leaves Alberta and not one red cent “saved” will come back to you since – need I remind you – these cuts are coming from a government that just raised your taxes by $600 million and its deficit by $2 billion. Each Albertan will receive exactly zero dollars in return for each fired nurse, and if you think I’m wrong, snap me a photo of the cheque when it arrives.

I’ll publish it next to my apology.

Second – and most importantly – employing fewer nurses is just plain bad. Alberta might have a younger population compared to other provinces, but it’s aging quickly and health-care needs are on the rise. Oil companies hire exactly as many workers as they need and when they cut staff it’s because that need has faded. Right now Albertans are being asked to understand the removal of life-saving professionals at a time when the need for life-saving professionals is growing.

Running health care like a for-profit business is utter madness, and any government that says otherwise believes money comes before your life – and it isn’t even your money.

They’ll keep saying unions are greedy. They might even say nurses are lazy. And they’ll definitely say doctors are overpaid. But if Albertans don’t demand a strong public health-care system, even in the face of a downturn, at least one of us is going to be celebrating that time the UCP stuck it to unions while they wait extra long at the hospital for a preoccupied doctor and a nurse who isn’t even there.

Scott Schmidt is the layout editor at the Medicine Hat News. Contact him at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com. All opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the News’ editorial board.

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