Canadians for Sustainable Medicare
Posted by Vi Hughes on Sep 15, 2016
On Tuesday we heard from Dr. Ed Papp, a family physician and past member of the Alberta Medical Association’s Board of Directors, and Ron Kustra (pictured) , a retired AMA Public Affairs Assistant Executive Director and now a spokesperson for Canadians for Sustainable Medicare.
They spoke about the multiple incidences of delayed, slow, or unavailable medical services in the Alberta medical care system. They emphasized how the current system is not working for many people and how we need o look at changes being made in other locales around the world, in order to get ideas on how to build a more functional system here in Alberta.
The cost of a public system is continually rising and we also need to look at other ways of doing things to help to better control the overall cost to the public. The lack of control over how medicine is practiced by the medical profession in Alberta, with nearly every small aspect of what they are allowed to do being controlled by cost, right down to how many phone calls a day they can make to patients, is also not the best way to deliver medical care.
They argued that we need a system that is governed more by the medical profession, to allow them to deliver the best twenty first century care possible at a reasonable price, without so much government control of how it is delivered.
Ron Kustra