Nobody Cares Ralph.

Ralph Klein speaks out from retirement on the issue that helped end his Premiership:

Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein maintains some strong opinions about health care in our province.

While attending an event in Red Deer Tuesday night for the Convenience Stores Association of Western Canada, Klein said health care spending in Alberta is out of control.

"It's going to come back and bite every politician of every political stripe, on the bum," he said. "It's out of control and no one wants to address it."

Klein said health care spending now makes up over 40 per cent of the provincial budget and insists that two-tiered health care, part publicly-funded and part private, is the way to lower costs.

"When health care consumes over half the budget, the total provincial budget, then I think people will understand health care costs are out of control."

Klein has been out of politics for more than two years.

Of course measured as a percentage of provincial GDP rather than the arbitrary budget numbers, healthcare costs in Alberta have been virtually static. Don't expect to hear that from Ralph or other fellow travelers in the 'rich people should be able to buy their way to the front of the line and get better care' movement to mention that. People might start realizing that means that healthcare is becoming a bigger percentage of the budget only because successive governments have deliberately impoverished Canada's provincial and federal budgets with huge tax giveaways to the rich and big corporations.

Since polling has repeatedly shown that healthcare, universal single tier public healthcare, is still a passionate high priority for Canadians these kind of regressive taxation policies will be harder and harder to defend and sustain as time goes on.