Alberta’s Health Minister Ron Liepert finally responded to the misinformation campaign that surrounds the issue of health-care reform. He gave a general, common-sense summary of the ways and means of improving our health-care system — all based on premises that every right-thinking Alberta taxpayer agrees with:
• Premise 1: Patients come first.
• Premise 2: The system must be affordable.
• Premise 3: The system must be publicly funded.
• Premise 4: The system must fully utilize the time and expertise of all the stake-holders involved in the delivery of health care.
• Premise 5: It’s time to quit just talking about health-care reform. It’s time to act!
So who are the voices that continually complain about every action step that our government makes toward health-care reform? It’s the same groups, always socialists and left-leaning liberals (Friends of Medicare), the nurses union leadership and the Alberta Medical Association leadership.
I sincerely wish that these anti-reform groups would shut up for a while and let our elected government do its job.
These groups bring nothing but negativity to the debate table, as evidenced over the last two decades. Their leaders are grit in the wheel of progress.
It is a waste of government time and money to pass along reform details to these group leaders. They are stuck in a narrow, socialist ideology that is a menace to our hope of objective health-care reform.
Jim Swan
Red Deer