Not Fixing Health Care

Paul Martin promised to fix health care for "a generation." This week he announced his plan: $12 billion over five years. Let's take a look at what this would mean in Alberta.

Alberta has about 10% of the country's population (3 million out of 30 million). That means that Alberta should be entitled to about $1.2 of that $12 billion. Since this is spread over five years, that comes to about $240 million. But the idea is that the funding will have an "escalator" clause so it will increase each year. That is, in the first year the province will get less than $240 million and in the last year, it will get more. For the sake of argument, let's assume it's $240 million every year.

Alberta's current health care expenditures are $9.1 billion dollars a year. That means that with Martin's "fix for a generation" we can now spend $9.35 billion on health care. This is barely an increase. If that's all that's needed to fix health care, how broke can it be?

Martin's proposal seems pretty pitiful to me. With our surplus we can easily come up with much more than $240 million if we wanted to. And of course, what we get initially will be less than $240 million, so my numbers are being generous.

Not much of a fix, Mr. Martin.