Quebec has a lot of issues, poor administrative state and an older population. They also have a larger administrative state because they want to regulate their own things, which just adds costs, a good reminder for Alberta.
They have far more doctors in the private stream, but they also have far more regulation and lower pay for almost all specialties. There's very little incentive for out of province medical students to stay for more paperwork and lower pay. It's not necessarily true that if Alberta does this, they'll be like Quebec, because our admin is inherently less cumbersome and pay is better.
I do think some form of private care needs to happen, without it, we cannot possibly fund care sufficiently. If someone pays to get ahead, that may be "unfair" but it shortens the waitlist for those still on it. The most important thing with privatization, which increases dollars going into the demand side, is to pair it with supply side reforms. If we simply privatize the healthcare, more dollars are still competing for the same insufficient pool of providers. What needs to happen is private dollars to increase supply, and those dollars flow to increased physicians, whether that's attracting outside physicians or increase internal training capacity.
An example is if we need to do more MRIs, we now allow private funding. The private clinic, pays to buy the machine and hires technicians trained in the US, charges patient a fee because so they can recoup those costs, that would increase healthcare supply in AB. But if they simply bid up the wages of the existing pool of technicians, those private dollars just increased profit margin without an increase in healthcare capacity.
www.alberta.ca
www.ctvnews.ca
