False Alarm: Health Care

Will McMartin writes in this morning’s Tyee:

“You can see what I’m trying to impress upon everyone,” [B.C.‘s Finance Minister Carole] Taylor told the assembled scribes, referring to a chart that showed health costs rising from 41.6 per cent of last year’s budget, to 71.3 percent in 2017–18. “This is an issue that we all have to get our heads around.”

In show-business parlance, it was a boffo performance. Predictably, B.C.‘s goggle-eyed news media quickly succumbed to the charms of our Gucci-favouring finance minister.

Golly. It’s a good thing that premier Gordon Campbell, who last spring fled the legislative assembly to tour European health facilities with his brother-in-law, has decided to cancel the legislature’s scheduled fall sitting to travel around B.C. and have a “conversation” about health care with British Columbians.

But there is just one, tiny problem with Taylor’s bleak forecast, and the underlying premise of Campbell’s desire to introduce dramatic reforms to B.C.‘s public health system.

There is no fiscal crisis.

Reports published by the finance ministry—readily available to the public, and the news media, too—show that provincial expenditures on health have not exploded, nor are they expected to do so in the foreseeable future. Taylor’s warning of a looming fiscal crisis caused by skyrocketing health spending is contradicted and refuted by her own department. (The Tyee – Carole Taylor’s False Alarm)

Why, you wonder, would Carole Taylor and Gordon Campbell try to pull off this stunt? Its simple: many politicians are completely consumed by dogmatic, virtually slavish, subservience to the ideology of the day, all at the expense of common sense.

Campbell and Taylor, like most market is king fiscal conservatives, see the world through a particular prism and a health care system which is largely like the one we have today doesn’t fit into their preferred future spectrum.

Of course, Campbell and Taylor are entitled to their opinions, but they are not to be granted the luxury of lying to the public in order to sell this particular bill of goods.

Not without paying a price.

Carole Taylor’s alarmist news conference earlier this month should have caused a great many journalists to perk up their ears and pick up their calculators, before writing word one. Quite apart from the issue of health care, an important question raised by this story is why haven’t other journalists and publications done their homework? Are they lazy? Co-opted by ideology themselves? Or have they simply succumbed to group-think and blindly bought into what’s known as the prevailing wisdom?

There’s a lot of the latter running around our political parties, of all stripes, these days – and always has been.

We treat managing our public affairs in a manner so haphazard that its almost Enron-like. Financial analysts and the business press wouldn’t allow a publicly traded company to use such shocking numbers (growth in health care spending from 41.6 per cent of last year’s budget, to 71.3 percent in just 11 years is not only absurd but shockingly so) without diving deeper first.

Rhetorical question of the day: as a society we pay far more attention to quarterly reports and stock prices, and penalize, heavily, any firm that dares to try to pull the wool over investors’ eyes. Why do we scrutinize so closely quarterly company reports, but readily, meekly, accept distorted facts and misleading figures along with the latest spin being spewed by our political leaders?

Here’s a stock tip: Sell short. Carole Taylor and Gordon Campbell’s “personal stock” should be pummelled.