The Bottom Line

The Parkland Institute has released a book about the real costs of public and private healthcare.

Most interesting point: The numbers show that the biggest cost increases in the public healthcare system come from it's private sector components:

But if the government truly wants to control costs, Fuller said, the answer is to lessen the role of the private sector in health care, not increase it. The part of the health care system that has been stable is physicians and hospital costs, which are the costs covered by Medicare, she said. Meanwhile, the proportion of national income spent on pharmaceutical drugs has more than doubled since 1980, and rates for supplementary private insurance are increasing at more than double the rate of inflation.

The so called 'reforms' called for by Premier Klein and the rest of the neo-conservative elites are policy in service to right wing ideology and a blind hatred for the public sector among the free market fanatics of the right. The rich are used to getting everything first and best, a system based on the idea that no one should be able to buy their way to the front of the line offends them on a pathological level.

More than anything else the Third Way is about enriching the already rich on the backs of the rest of us.

If the easily verifiable facts and numbers supported the idea that privatizing healthcare would improve it, I'd support it. They show the exact opposite.

We can only hope that the Third Way died with Ralph Klein's political career - and keep an eye on whoever his successor is to make sure they don't try the same thing.