Healthcare
Adopted June 17, 2023
The arrogance of politicians is stunning. They act as if only they can fix the healthcare system that failed under their watch.
Our healthcare system failed because no one running the system is accountable. There are no incentives to improve efficiency or effectiveness. Bureaucrats and healthcare professionals make operational decisions, and neither group has training in administration.
Healthcare administration is a specialty field where public needs, medical professional needs and the available budget are balanced. Each facility must be stand-alone, accountable, and measured against a standard of excellence.
Huge hospital complexes that deliver every conceivable healthcare service are inefficient. Hospital emergency rooms are outdated. We need urban and rural trauma centres where patients with dire injuries or illnesses can be treated and stabilized for further treatment in appropriate facilities.
We need more specialty facilities to deal with joint replacement, sleep disorders, diabetes control, and a host of other procedures where demand is sufficient to warrant the facility. We will invest into more personal care homes which will be accountable and meet a standard of excellence.
Restructuring healthcare cannot succeed without private sector investment in land, buildings, and personnel. We don’t have the public money available. Government procurement is notoriously expensive and inefficient. The same standard of excellence would apply to private healthcare delivery facilities.
We have a two-tier system where thousands of Manitobans are on waiting lists for medically approved procedures.
The federal government must transfer tax points to the provinces and confine its role in healthcare to that mandated under our constitution. Healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction, and federal interference brought us disaster.
Our government has a large bureaucracy to administer healthcare, and it failed us. The system is broken and must be replaced. Failure to monitor the bureaucracies and demand performance to protect the public cannot be tolerated.
Healthcare has an administrative problem, not a funding problem. We have too many fingers in the pie and vested interests at play. It will take a couple of decades to fully recover from this crisis, and we can’t start soon enough.