Dear Editor,
The reduction of spending on the construction of public health care infrastructure is considered a cost reduction strategy by the Conservative government, at least that is how AHS CEO Stephen Duckett is selling this snake oil.
I would like Albertans to consider the increase in public expenditure to private clinics, sold to us on the basis of reducing the backlog of health surgeries, and ask themselves who is paying for the capital infrastructure expenditures of these private companies.
As a business must recoup their costs, there must be an overhead component to the payments made by the Conservatives to these private entities, so the public starves for health infrastructure while the public pays private enterprise to increase their private health infrastructure.
Somehow it doesn’t make good fiscal sense to me to build infrastructure for private concerns while playing the poverty card to reduce expenditures for public health care infrastructure. The Conservatives are paying rent when they should be buying to own.
Don McGregor,
Edmonton, AB.