Showing the way

Terilyn Paulgaard nicely summarizes how Klein's Third Way leads in entirely the wrong direction:

PIPs (private insurance providers) won't cover everyone, or do so at great cost. Your grandmother had breast cancer? That would make you "high risk." Such a family history would produce the same effect as a drunk-driving charge: insurance rates so high as to be prohibitive, if you could find someone to cover you at all.

The Third Way assumes these people would remain in the public system for health care. That's when they would discover another interesting detail about the Third Way plan: Many current services are being delisted. The extras that keep a condition at bay – such as insulin for diabetes – are being stripped from the system. For people without private health care, these extras would come out of pocket and could add up to thousands of dollars a month. To counter this, the government would follow Australia's lead and subsidize private-care premiums. So much for the savings of privatization...

For all the havoc Action 13 could potentially cause, the most tragic consideration is that the whole premise behind the Third Way is flawed. Remember, the two main incentives driving it are the assumptions that the current plan is unsustainable and wait times must be shortened.

As The Bottom Line points out, wait times are already being shortened. And PIPs will not shorten wait times, only shift who waits in which line.

Of course, there are certainly some who stand to gain from those shifts...but there's no reason why their financial health should be prioritized ahead of the physical health of Albertans. And hopefully a few more articles like Paulgaard's will make that point clear enough to make Klein reconsider what legacy he wants to leave.