An economist and health policy expert is skeptical the administrator appointed to replace the Alberta Health Services Board can lower wait times..Herb Emery, former program director of health policy at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, told the Western Standard no individual can make health care efficient..“If you believe there's one person who's capable of doing this, then we're in a lot of trouble because you can't replicate that individual or scale them. I just don't believe they exist because no system as large and as complex and as diverse as a healthcare system is run by a single individual,” Emery said..Last week Alberta Premier Danielle Smith fired the part-time AHS board and appointed 78-year-old Dr. John Cowell as a full-time administrator to replace them. He was tasked with shortening wait times for emergency medical service responses, emergency rooms, and surgeries, plus develop long-term reforms..Emery, now an economics professor at the University of New Brunswick, said an independent health market would best fulfill Cowell’s mandate, but that's not in his power to implement..“I've tried for years to get people to think through what's missing in healthcare that's present in every other sector, and the answer is a price mechanism that allocates resources. You're looking for that magical person who can come in and decide where to allocate resources and how to organize things without the power of anything like a price signal,” Emery said..“He's going to need unbelievable information input so that he would know where the pain points are, where the opportunities to shift reality, or reallocate resources will be. But then, even if you have that information, there's nothing that allows consumers to direct resources where they need them to go like there would be in other markets.”.Emery said the main problems with healthcare stem from the way it's paid for and the dogmas that prevent market-based solutions..“We have to be polite and pretend healthcare can't have a functioning price system. What it does have is a fixed price system. And it's the worst price system of all because it basically keeps the relative prices of all the services and providers and it just adds the cost of inflation to them every year. And then as you have shifting needs, if you don't ration it, it tends to pump up like a balloon. And if you do ration it, it tends to create things like nobody has a family doctor and you have massive wait lists.”.Healthcare has become an unnecessary and impossible political challenge in Emery’s view, one he said could be solved by allowing market forces..“Premiers use the wrong words. They keep talking about privatization, but the system's already privately delivered — it's just publicly paid for doctors and hospitals. But what they figured out is it's impossible for them to reallocate the resources the way they need to be and they don't even have a clue where to start. And when they try to do anything, there's public outcry,” Emery said..“If you can move this stuff so the resources follow more of a market, then the politicians are kind of off the hook because the patients are happy; no one's really noticing anything wrong, and you don't have this top-down announcement about who's being shut down. But they're never going to make that transition because we have groups in Canada who believe the justice of our system is established and how we do things, not what the outcomes are..“And so the only supposed solution to this is the federal government needs to give everybody billions in free money which we don't have. Robbing the future generation to paper over a system that's doomed is just not the way forward. But nobody's ready to talk about that yet in Canada.”
