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Alberta Criminality of Privatization in Health Care
Through commercial contracts, the government hands over the service to the private operator who sets standards on the basis of reducing "costs," including wages and the quality and quantity of goods and services and is answerable only to shareholders and not to the people who are the public authority it is duty bound to serve. Privatization also destroys the relationships within the health care system and removes decision-making from the front line to corporate offices far away from where health care is provided and with no conception of the needs on the front lines. Where cleaning is privatized, for example, the cleaner's work is assigned from a corporate office. In an emergency, for instance in an Emergency Department, a doctor or nurse employed by the health authority cannot ask a cleaner employed by a private enterprise to leave a routine task to disinfect an area that is urgently needed for patient care. Such a request has to be communicated to the office of the private enterprise where the assignment may or may not be communicated to a worker and certainly not in a timely manner. This is one of the greatest complaints that health care workers have with privatized services, that they destroy the health care team which is essential to patient care. The mantra of the cartel parties is that it doesn't matter whether health care is delivered by private enterprise or by a public authority; all that matters is that it be of good quality. But it is precisely "good quality" health care that is sacrificed in serving narrow private interests and eliminating the human factor from any decision-making. When the private sector provides housekeeping, working conditions and wages of workers are below the standard in the public system and the quality of training, equipment and supplies is reduced. A consequence of the low wages and poor working conditions is the constant turnover of staff which makes the shortage of trained staff even greater. A study by public health officials in British Columbia of an outbreak of C. difficile which took the lives of many patients in one hospital found that the poor standards and training and constant turnover of staff were significant contributing factors to the hospital's difficulty in getting the outbreak under control and to the lives lost. Workers know that this is the case with privatized housekeeping across the board and that the same is true of other contracted-out services. Quality suffers and the public authority has no control because that has been handed over to the private operator. The opposition of the people to privatization is so profound and the announcement of privatization of health services in the middle of a pandemic is so egregious that Health Minister Shandro had to pretend everything is being done to look after the people. The Kenney government has not only postponed the implementation of some measures in the name of developing "business cases" for environmental and food services in 2022 and 2023. In announcing the government's plans to further privatize laundry and laboratory services, Health Minister Shandro perfidiously highlighted the management positions which are being axed as if this makes the dismantling of the healthcare system acceptable to the workers -- both losing their jobs and those who have to make do with a restructured system they have no role in setting up. Minister Shandro said "The pandemic has changed everything. As a result, AHS [Alberta Health Services] has been directed to proceed carefully, putting patient care above all else. As a first step, AHS has been directed to eliminate a minimum of 100 management positions and to proceed with previously announced contracting work. This approach will allow us to strike the right balance between supporting the COVID-19 response and Alberta's challenging fiscal situation." The fact is that the plans that are being implemented now are those that have been on the government's agenda to pay the rich all along. It is shameless for Shandro to say that patient care is being put above all else. To proceed in this direction in the situation where the health care system and all the workers are under the strain that the past decades of neo-liberal wrecking have created, will cause unimaginable chaos and cost lives. It seems the calculation is that the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, alongside the legislation that has already been passed to criminalize anyone who interferes with "critical infrastructure," make this an opportune time to proceed with this vast destructive anti-social restructuring to irreversibly change the health care system.
No measures have been taken to correct the situation, and now COVID-19 cases are increasing again. The solution clearly does not lie in further privatization and governments giving more money to the private operators, which is what governments are proposing and the "solution" demanded by the private operators themselves. Workers and families have repeatedly proposed measures that would change the situation in long-term care, which are all based on putting the needs of seniors and the workers that care for them as the aim. The fulfillment of this aim requires an end to all the pay-the-rich measures and increased investment in long-term care and all aspects of the health care system. These plans of the Kenney government further reveal the need for workers and their organizations to take up the social responsibility that the Kenney government is abdicating, to denounce these plans and mobilize public opinion against the cuts to health care services and privatization by putting forward solutions to the problems in the health care system that favour the people and hold the government to account. (Photos: TML)
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
Alberta Health
Minister Tyler Shandro announced at a press
conference on October 13
that the government is proceeding with the layoff
of 11,000 health care
workers as a result of privatization of services
including laundry,
laboratories, food services and environmental
services. This
announcement is part of fulfilling the mandate
oligopolies in the
health sector have given governments to destroy
any vestige of a public
authority that acknowledges and upholds the
responsibility of the state
for the well-being of the people. This
restructuring puts all
decision-making and regulation into the hands of
the private interests
who provide "services" for profit with that profit
guaranteed by the
state from public funds. The announcement thus
reveals once
again the corruption and criminality involved
when it comes to the
privatization of health care among other social
programs and state
functions that have been or are being privatized.
The criminality
of privatization in health care was exposed by the
suffering and deaths
in long-term care homes in the first wave of the
pandemic, with the
worst situations and highest death rates in the
private-for-profit
homes. It is in this sector that the effects of
privatization and the
destruction of a public authority which takes
responsibility for
setting and enforcing standards are most
obvious. 