Doctor Oberg knows his stuff when it comes to health care
Progressive Conservative leadership challenger Lyle Oberg dedicated 14 years of his life as a family doctor and enjoyed every single day of it.
That’s despite Canada’s doctors being underpaid and just appallingly overworked, all thanks to the cut-throat policies of the Paul Martin and Jean Chretien federal Liberal regimes savaging health-care funding to the provinces.
“A family doctor connects so personally with his patients,” the Brooks MLA explained to me.
“Not just once or twice when a catastrophe hits. You see your patients month-after-month and year-in, year-out. ”
Coincidentally, Oberg did his doctoring in the communities of Cold Lake and Brooks, so he was no big city doctor running a conveyer-belt walk-in clinic.
Oberg’s comments about the personal touch of family doctors are reminiscent of my own family doctor, Brian Boyd, who has tended to me with great patience for 18 years, and a medical school colleague of Brian’s, Norris Rich, who now lives close to my home in Guadalajara, Mexico, and whose career was cut short by a devastating car accident.
Both Brian and Norris, like Lyle, talk about the great personal satisfaction of treating patients, often from when the day they were born to when they get married and start bringing their own offspring into the surgery.
Oberg has been an MLA since 1993, winning four elections, and holding three portfolios: Transportation and infrastructure, education, and family and social services.
Hefty portfolios, for sure, and assignments demonstrating the confidence Premier Ralph Klein had in him to get the jobs done.
We all know unless we get health-care costs under control, they’ll pretty much eat up the entire budget before too long.
It’s perplexing.
While the provincial government will spend 37% of its entire budget on health care this year, we have waiting lines and hospitals without beds.
One reason for this, I contend, is when we were kids, if we got a headache or a sneeze, or cut our finger or got a gash on our knee, our mothers gave us an Aspirin, or pulled out a BandAid or bandage.
Now it’s off to the emergency ward.
Indeed, one study shows after user-fees were banned, visits to some emergency wards were up 200% within 12 months.
Not surprisingly, Oberg has some significant proposals to heal the ailing system, including:
– Get pro-active in disease management.
More than half of provincial spending goes on treating patients with chronic disease.
Prevent people from getting chronic disease with early diagnosis of their susceptibility to it.
For instance, the medical technology now exists to assess whether an individual is at risk for diabetes, and many other afflictions, at an early age.
Identity those patients, and ameliorate the risk.
– Enhance patient choices.
If some patients want to pay extra to have elective procedures done quicker and to fit their schedules, let them do it.
They can absorb the cost, and also lessen the strain on the public system.
– Give doctors the right to take in private patients, but compel such doctors to have at least 75% of their practice in the public system.
For fairness, doctors should fill their 75% commitment to the public system before being allowed to take in private patients.
– Eliminate health-care premiums over a four-year period.
Premiums are basically an inequitable tax on the self-employed and lower middle-income groups.
I never fully understood why Klein never made Oberg provincial health minister.
We surely needed someone holding that portfolio who had some hands-on expertise in the field.
Here, I’m not simply talking about Lyle’s years of tending to the new-born, to the sick, or the soon-to-be departed, but also to his many other medical activities.
He’s been medical adviser to his local Canadian Diabetes Association, medical director of the Brooks Ambulance Service, medical director of the Alberta Summer Games, Chief of Staff at the Brooks Health Centre.
In the legislature, he also did a stint as co-chair of the 1993-95 Health Plan Co-ordination Project, and chairman of the Standing Policy Committee on Health Restructuring between 1995-97.
There’s more to Oberg’s diagnosis and prognosis, as we’ll be hearing in the coming weeks, and one thing is for sure, it will come from an individual who knows what he’s talking about.
Perhaps he may soon restore health to the system, not as minister of health but as the actual premier of our province.
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