Cost of health procedures Tories’ little secret

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/06/2023 (804 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

How much does it cost to buy a home-administered sleep test from a local company?

It’s not only a fair question, it’s essential as government and medical professionals spar over how best to deal with a waiting list of more than 5,800 Manitobans who need to be tested for sleep disorders.

Unfortunately, the provincial government won’t say how much it is paying for 10,000 “sleep studies” it is buying from Winnipeg-based Cerebra Medical that involve “in-home polysomnography” testing and analysis. The Cerebra tests are meant to augment traditional lab-based tests performed at the Sleep Disorder Centre at Misericordia hospital and, it is hoped, reduce the number of Manitobans on the wait list.

The decision by the province’s diagnostic and surgical recovery task force has been severely criticized by the physicians in charge of the Sleep Disorder Centre, and by opposition parties who believe the Cerebra contract represents a significant move to privatize an important area of heath services.

A cost-benefit analysis — including a comparison of the cost of doing a test at Misericordia and one at home with a Cerebra test — is central to determining if this contract is a wise use of taxpayer money. Unfortunately, you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis if you don’t know what something costs.

That is hardly the only instance in which this government has refused to say how much it spends on a key health program.

In early June, community groups raised the alarm about a shortage of naloxone (narcan) kits used to treat drug overdoses. Health department officials said a shortage of the life-saving kits, which are provided free of charge to the public, was due to a “supply issue” that it would not explain in any detail.

However, when asked how much it had spent to date this year on the life-saving kits, and how much the kits cost per unit, the province refused to give the details.

Also in June, the Free Press tried to find out how much the province was paying for surgeries at private facilities in Manitoba, elsewhere in Canada and in the United States to alleviate a crushing backlog.

After weeks of refusals, health department officials finally confirmed the province spent $24 million, including $440,000 in travel expenses, for 480 patients. However, the officials refused to say how much they pay for an individual surgery at any of the private facilities.

The PC government has said additional procedures would be more expensive than what it would cost to do them here in Manitoba in the public system. But that does not relieve the government of the obligation to tell taxpayers how much more expensive, particularly when many of the expenditures are tied directly to mismanagement of health care by the PC government.

The government claims it has been forced to buy surgeries at private facilities all over Canada and the U.S. Midwest because of backlogs created by the COVID-19 pandemic. While that did exacerbate things, the real cause of the historically high wait times for priority surgeries and diagnostic services was the crippling austerity imposed on health care.

For most of the last six years, health funding was effectively frozen. Contracts with health care professionals were in limbo. The Tories made wholesale changes to the hospital network in Winnipeg without properly consulting nurses.

All those decisions have come back to haunt the Tories — and Manitobans — in the form of a health care system that does not have the capacity to deal with the backlogs.

Of course, the Tories won’t admit that is why they are withholding this important information. Instead, they cite the Freedom of Information and Personal Privacy Act, a law that is rife with contradictions.

For example, section 17 of the law says it is reasonable to release “financial or other details of a contract to supply goods or services to, or on behalf of, a public body.” That would seem to support the release of the cost of home sleep tests, naloxone kits and private surgeries.

However, section 18 of FIPPA allows the government to withhold information that could be harmful to a third party’s business interests, including trade secrets, scientific or technical information, and anything that would “result in significant financial loss or gain to a third party.

Does basic information about the cost of a good or service qualify as potentially harmful to the vendor or supplier in the above examples? It’s a very long bow for government to draw, but the bow does exist.

However, the constant use of FIPPA to deny the release of even the most basic information about the cost of certain health-related goods and services is more about politics than the commercial interests of third parties.

Right now, just over 90 days away from the next provincial election, the Tories are trying desperately to ensure no one can put an exact price tag on the Tory legacy in health care.

Even without exact dollar figures, there is still one thing we know to be true: the Tory philosophy for managing health care has been penny wise and pound foolish.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com