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Leaked: UCP Post-Election Alberta Healthcare Plans
A glimpse into the UCP “fix” for health care.
As Alberta Canada’s provincial election nears its close, an insider in the ruling UCP party contacted me off the record about the party’s plans for health care after the election is over (and assuming they win). I am unable to verify with certainty, and can share no details about this informant without endangering their job and/or making them a target of online hate. I couldn’t in good conscience not share this. I welcome the skeptical to simply consider this a piece of well-informed satire or projection based upon extrapolation from the past statements and bad decisions already made by the party and its current Premier, if that premise helps you to sleep better at night.
The UCP have already told us what they want
The most important thing to understand about the UCP approach to health care is this: They see the state of Alberta’s health care today as movement in the right direction. This is what success looks like to them. The current shambles isn’t remotely their end goal, but it’s a welcome (to them) signpost along the road of their preferred trajectory. Their destination: full throttle US-style healthcare-as-profit-engine privatization. The UCP party made the privatization of Alberta’s health care their explicit public goal at their annual general meeting in 2020. A two tiered system: top quality gold plated best-in-show health care for the rich, with barely-a-band-aid-on-a-bullet-wound health care left over for the rest of us.
They intend for this privatization to happen with, and this part is important, absolute irreversibility, so that no future government of any kind can try to Humpty Dumpty the scorched earth private rubble they’ve left behind back into a functioning universal health care system once they’ve left office. The road they’re driving the AHS down only goes one way.
It involves a multi-pronged strategy with several coordinated elements, which I shall attempt to organize below. In short, the UCP want more control, middlemen, blame, and disinformation in health care, combined with less testing and publicly available information. There may be some some very distracting thinking outside of the box policies as bait to…
