But then again, no one ever asks, at least not with any real intent to act on what they hear, and so here we are.
And it’s not necessarily a public-versus-private healthcare debate — the services provided by DynaLIFE before the original deal were not shoddy. In fact, Fiona Clement, a professor who specializes in health policy in the department of community health sciences at the University of Calgary,
that it has a “decades-long history of providing excellent care up north” in the province. There were a whole slew of reasons the expansion didn’t work. But there is a larger message here, which is that privately delivered health services aren’t necessarily better — for people or for the bottom line.
It’s not even clear that lab operations in Calgary needed a whole lot of improvement in the first place.
who is also a clinical professor at the University of Calgary, lab services “were working well before the takeover,” suggesting that what was well enough should have been left alone.
The question then becomes, what is it about healthcare, arguably the most important service for humans, that makes our governments feel it appropriate to throw lots of money at dubious endeavours like the DynaLIFE deal, instead of supporting and improving existing systems and models? As health policy analyst
Steven Lewis recently wrote in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix
, when it comes to fixing what’s wrong about Canada’s healthcare system, “s
pending is not the problem; it’s getting nothing for it time and again.” And c
ertainly, a lot of it has to do with politicking, but it’s also a brutal example of leading with closed eyes and ears. Which isn’t really leading at all.
