Opinion: All dollars and no sense — another health-care privatization failure waiting to happen

It’s déjà vu in Alberta health care again.

First, the UCP tried to privatize lab testing, failing spectacularly when wait times skyrocketed. Instead of the $36 million in savings per year that the UCP promised, the province spent almost $100 million to buy out DynaLife.

Then it moved select surgeries to chartered facilities, costing double for some surgeries and shifting qualified health-care providers away from the public system.

With this record, the UCP now wants to privatize diagnostic screening and testing services, including full-body scans. What many Albertans may not know is that we’ve privatized diagnostic testing for more than 25 years, and it has cost us big time.

Back in 1998, there was a change in the rules for diagnostic testing in Alberta, put forward to tackle wait time