If the United Conservative Party wants to be the alternative to the NDP government, there is no better starting point than health-care policy.
Health-care spending - $21.4 billion - accounts for almost half of the Alberta provincial operating budget of $45.8 billion in the current fiscal year.
Yet the UCP has no heath-care alternative.
In a study of the health-care systems of the 11 highest income nations of the world, released in July by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund, Canada ranks ninth in performance, ahead only of France and the United States.
The study, entitled Mirror, Mirror 2017, compares the public health-care systems of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The title is derived from the queen in the 1937 Disney animated movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, who asks: "Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?"
Well, Canada - the pioneer of medicare - is not the fairest.
Ninth-ranked Canada spends 10 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care compared to the United States at 16.6 per cent (the highest) and Australia at nine per cent (the lowest). It doesn't matter how much GDP is devoted to health care, because Australia ranks second in quality of care but the U.S. is lowest.
Canada ranks second poorest in the disparity between lower- and higher-income adults for access to health care and the quality of care received, better only than the U.S.
These are just two figures from 25 pages of many comparisons, none led by Canada, a mediocre player in the report.
Why pay attention to the Commonwealth Fund's findings? In a word: credibility. The fund has a century of experience in health care.
It is a private philanthropic foundation launched in 1918 by Anna Harkness with an oil fortune that her husband, Stephen, made by being an early investor in the pioneer oil refining company Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler that became Standard Oil.
After his death, Anna moved to New York City and devoted herself to using her fortune, "for the welfare of mankind." A hundred years ago, she endowed the Commonwealth Fund with $10 million - the equivalent of $175 million in 2017.
The foundation now has nearly $800 million in assets. During a century of activity, it has funded medical schools, medical research including the work of Nobel laureates, and public health, most notably the health of children.
Its mission statement is "to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable and the elderly."
It is clear on reading the foundation report that no amount of public money can improve the outcomes of the health- care system.
Only leadership can. In Alberta that starts with the leadership of the provincial government that pays for health care with taxpayers' money.
If the UCP wants to form government, it had better say what it intends to do to lead improvement in health-care outcomes.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books, editor of several more and is working this summer on the history of Trimac Transportation and the McCaig family.
