Lately this has been a common claim from people who think that the evil publicly funded healthcare system is falling apart not because all public systems fall apart but instead because "evil governments have stolen the cash".Here's a better idea - read carefully - take $1.4 billion from the available funds stashed away by Con provincial governments (from funding given by the feds already) & pay medical workers, including nurses, better. No need to cut CBC funding. Easy when you are actually motivated
— Phil van Wulven (@philwrite) September 16, 2022
(Fun aside: remind them that they can't demand the government run healthcare and then be upset that the wrong government got in)
So the government of Canada supposedly gave provincial governments an extra $1.4B dollars (all non-inflation adjusted, of course). Let's look at the 2022 federal budget [pdf] (which will contain 2021 actuals and will of course have tables full of actual numbers, right?)
Of course not, why would a federal budget contain such silly frivolities. Now you can try to look at the gap between 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 numbers and discern for yourself whether this looks like more money or less than the $1.4B which Phil claims was sent to the provinces.
Instead let's start looking at provincial budgets and see if we can find where this money went! Let's start on the left coast.
In 2020/2021, the BC Government spent a "mere" $22.231B on "People's Health Care" which sounds about as communist as...well, it actually is.
In 2021/2022 however, they apparently received (a share) of $1.4B in this much ballyhooed extra bit of spending. How much did they "stash away"? Well, they now spend $23.882B which is...uh...$1.651B higher. That means that I'm done. I've proven Phil wrong: the British Columbia government alone spent more on healthcare this year than the entire federal increase. And what outcomes has BC received for their big spending push? Whoops! CBC reports that "B.C.'s health-care crisis is unrelenting". Funny about that.
Well, I'm sure that when Phil accused "Con provincial governments" he didn't have John Horgan in mind. So let's look at Alberta, where I've already established public healthcare has too much money and needs to be cut back. The 2022 Alberta budget uses actual documents with numbers, showing that again $20.285B was spent on (non-COVID) healthcare in 2020/2021, decreasing in 2021-2022 to...oh, no, wait, they went up as well, to $21.418B, an increase of $1.1B. Remember this doesn't factor in the COVID numbers (BC presumably does), adding an extra $3.148B. So already one Conservative government has spent $1.1B of the $1.4B...but at least it's working out good for us and oh right there's a "nightmare" healthcare breakdown going on.
Let's do one more for fun. The 2021/2022 Saskatchewan budget called for $6.535B in healthcare spending. The 2020/2021 numbers are, surprise surprise, lower, at a mere $6.362. This is only $0.173B, but already Alberta and Saskatchewan combine for a $1.306B increase in healthcare spending. Unlike Alberta, at least Saskatchewan can rest easy knowing that...no, I lied, Saskatchewan nurses claim they've been in a crisis for over a month now. Don't worry though, flatlanders, the budget is going up to $6.823B in 2022/2023, I'm sure that will fix it!
Ontario and that horribly right-wing Doug Ford are...oh, right, increasing their healthcare spending from $64.4B in 2020/2021 to $71B in 2021/2022. Hey, isn't that increase $6.6B, almost five times higher than the amount that Phil said "conservative provincial governments" were refusing to spend (collectively, nationwide) and would (presumably, the tweet doesn't make it clear) solve the crisis? With so much money going into the healthcare system, finally we've found a oh wait nevermind: Ontario hospitals and long-term care facilities are in crisis.
It's starting to look like Phil's talking out of his ass, doesn't it?
Longtime readers won't be surprised by this, of course. The ultimate problem is public healthcare: so long as it's "free" to users and the financiers never have the chance to audit the books, it will continue to cost more and more and continue to underperform and fail more and more spectacularly. Paying the workers isn't the solution: in fact, every public healthcare worker is already overpaid by a significant margin. Cutting their pay makes a lot more sense. On a more long-term and global solution, a private-public hybrid system might at least partially fix the practical if not the moral problems. However, until all Canadians have the right to refuse to fund the healthcare of people we don't wish to fund (on an individual rather than collective basis, of course), we won't have a fully operable and accomplished system.
What we certainly can't do is take steps forward while also wasting money on a propaganda network that constantly amplifies the misinformation of nurses unions and people like Phil. Which is why the CBC must be disbanded. Then we can work on dismantling a healthcare system in perpetual crisis.
