Lorne Gunter: AHS investigation needs to be independent, transparent

I’m warning you, this is a six of one, half a dozen of the other kind of column.

When the story first broke that former Alberta Health Services (AHS) boss Athana Mentzelopoulos was claiming interference by the UCP government in the awarding of health contracts to private surgical providers, I thought it wouldn’t be surprising if her allegations were true. (Mentzelopoulos’s allegations are part of a $1.7-million lawsuit claiming she was wrongfully dismissed back in January.)

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But I also wondered whether this was a case of the empire striking back. For decades, AHS has been the empire running health care in Alberta. Maybe AHS execs resisted UCP efforts to reform health care, so the politicians had to get involved to make sure the policies approved by the duly elected government were implemented over the objections of the old palace guard.

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I now believe it’s a bit of both.

At her news conference on Wednesday, Premier Danielle Smith said her government has attempted to reform AHS (by breaking it up into four units and paying for more surgeries to be done in private clinics). But it has encountered scores of AHS administrators who are “OK with status quo.” Either for ideological reasons (such as an unwavering belief in government-monopoly health care) or selfish reasons (like lots of power and big salaries). These diehard health bureaucrats have “always shown us resistance,” Smith said.

As the premier added, had these resisters had their way and all surgeries were still performed in public hospitals, there would have been “62,000 fewer surgeries done in Alberta last year.” Chartered surgical facilities (CFS) have had an impressive impact.

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The Alberta Surgical Group, the private clinic on the southside of Edmonton that is the subject of much of the government-Mentzelopoulos dispute, is capable of doing nearly twice as many knee and hip replacements in a day as most hospitals, and discharges patients on the same day.

Throwing more and more money at the public health monopoly has done little or nothing to shorten wait times. If the goal is to do more surgeries, more effectively, then CFSs have to be the future.

However, there are many True Believers in the health system who resist all efforts to privatize health delivery even if the government continues to pay for every patient’s care.

By all accounts of those I have spoken with inside the government and inside AHS, Mentzelopoulos was not one of the resistors. Instead, she seemed determined to heed the government’s policy direction while also ensuring contract procedures were protecting taxpayer monies and following above-board practices.

The long and the short of it is that the Smith government must commission a truly independent investigation, with as much haste as possible. There is not enough conclusive evidence to decide this, one way or the other.

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It’s suspicious that the Alberta Surgical Group contract was on the road to be concluded at 12 per cent above the going price for such contracts. Yet it’s equally head-scratching that Mentzelopoulos claimed to have brought her allegations to Minister LaGrange’s attention eight times, yet never seems to have followed up with the documents LaGrange requested.

But why would Mentzelopoulos have been fired just two days before meeting with Auditor General Doug Wylie? And why would the AHS board have been dismissed, all of them, after they began pushing for Mentzelopoulos’s documents to be turned over to the RCMP?

It was ridiculous for the almost-invisible NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi to call for Smith’s and LaGrange’s resignations on the unproven allegations, less than 48 hours after this story first broke.

There isn’t any evidence yet that Smith was involved.

But only a transparent, independent investigation will clear the air.

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