In the past year and a half, Alberta’s population has grown the fastest of any province in Canada. Inflation has kept driving up the cost of everything. But healthcare spending hasn’t kept up. And this has hurt rural Albertans the most.
A new report, called “Access Denied: How the Changing Accessibility of Health-Care Services in Alberta Impacts Equity,” explores just how the government’s failure to properly fund healthcare impacts Albertans. Written by Rebecca Graff-McRae and commissioned by Friends of Medicare, the report states that healthcare spending in 2023-2024 was “just half of the rate of population growth plus inflation” – far from the amount the province would need to spend to keep citizens healthy.
The report says that “health care in Alberta is in the eye of a perfect storm.”
The pandemic weakened our healthcare system for five years. Already in 2021, doctors were starting to leave Alberta in droves. This has left rural Alberta without enough doctors.
But even more are planning on leaving. In 2024, the Alberta Medical Association found that six in ten doctors are considering quitting, retiring, or leaving the province. If doctors follow through on their promises, Alberta’s health care problem could get a whole lot worse.
Now, Alberta’s population has begun to grow quickly. Healthcare funding hasn’t kept up.
Hence the phrase “eye of the storm.”
Rural Albertans Feel Shortages Most
Hospitals in rural Alberta were closed for a total of 34,000 hours in 2024. Many families and individuals who’ve gone to their local small-town hospital only to find it closed have found themselves in nightmare experiences.
There’s the story of Tracey Monetta, who was forced to drive her infant son, who was “slipping in and out of consciousness,” fifty kilometers from Elk Point to Bonnyville because the Elk Point Healthcare Center was experiencing a temporary service disruption. Town and Country Today reported that the Monetta’s family has since moved to Bonnyville, where healthcare service is more steady.
Pregnant women in Pincher Creek have been forced to drive over 100 kilometers to Lethbridge once they go into labour. Catherine Calling Last was one such woman. She recounted her nerve-wracking hour drive to the CBC. “Sometimes your labour can just kick right into full gear … and baby’s ready to come out. I was thinking about the worst-case scenario,” she said.
Emergency department closures due to doctor shortages are not the only problem facing small town hospitals, though. The Friends of Medicare report outlines how shortages of hospital beds, nursing staff, and family doctors all strain a system that is already struggling.
It highlights how sometimes, multiple hospitals within a geographical region close. “In the electoral riding of Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre, obstetrical services have been limited or entirely unavailable in three of the region’s hospitals, putting additional capacity pressure on Red Deer Regional Hospital,” it says.
Money Wasted on Private Healthcare
The Alberta government’s 2025 budget included a 5.4 percent increase in healthcare spending. That’s a significant jump from 2024. Alberta’s 2024 budget increased healthcare funding just 3.6 percent from the prior year.
It would be easy to see this as good news. It would be easy to breathe a sigh of relief and say that the provincial government is starting to put the health care needs of Albertans first. That they’ve got a plan to get more doctors into rural hospitals, and that wait times for cancer treatment are going to go down.
It would be easy to hope that this means that Alberta is going to take the suffering and medical woes of Albertans seriously.
Unfortunately, this is likely to not be the case.
Chris Gallaway of Friends of Medicare said in a news release that the 2025 budget doesn’t show any plans to improve Albertans’ access to health care, even though it will increase spending. “The government is continuing to use our public health care dollars to fund the expansion of private addictions treatment centres, and to accelerate the use of private, for-profit surgical centres and other contracts with for-profit providers.”
Private healthcare has shown itself to be disastrously expensive. The title of a report from the Parkland Institute says it all: “Private Surgical Contracts Deliver Higher Costs and Longer Waits”.
Put short, the 2025 budget is likely to waste our money instead of taking care of us.
“We are decades behind in needed health care infrastructure. It’s time to get to work. Alberta urgently needs a capacity plan for new beds and a workforce plan to ensure we can keep our health care system staffed and our facilities open,” Gallaway said.
