By Gil McGowan, AFL Staff

Health care costs in Alberta have doubled…

Health spending will soon eat up more than half of the provincial budget…

These are just two of the attention-grabbing statistics that the Alberta government has been using over the past few weeks to convince Albertans that Medicare is no longer affordable.

The goals of the government’s latest public-relations offensive have never been formally stated, but they are clear nonetheless.

In a general sense, the Premier and other members of his government want Albertans to believe that public health care is not working and that some form privatization is the only option.

In a more specific sense, the barrage of negative publicity about public health care is designed to soften the public up for the Mazankowski Report – which Premier Klein has promised will act as a blueprint for "radical reforms" in our province’s health care system.

So, from a purely strategic point of view, all the Klein government’s "sky-is-falling" rhetoric about health spending makes sense – it’s a great way to convince people that dramatic, private-sector solutions are needed.

The only problem with the government’s "facts" is they are (at best) misleading or (at worst) entirely false.

Most of the numbers that the government points to as "proof" that Medicare is unsustainable come from the latest report on provincial health spending produced by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), a well-respected non-partisan research agency that is funded jointly by Statistics Canada and the federal Health department.

According to the report, which was released in October, government spending on health care has increased substantially in every province over the past few years. In Alberta, the CIHI report shows that provincial health spending has gone from about $4 billion in 1995-96 to slightly more than $6 billion in 2000-01.

On the surface, this seems like a big jump – exactly the impression that the Klein government wants to leave with voters.

However, these are "raw figures" that do not take into account a number of important factors such as inflation, population growth and the fact that Alberta’s health system is still trying to make up for the deep cuts of the mid-90s.

In order to get a clearer picture of what’s really going on with health spending in Alberta, you have to dig deeper into the CIHI report – something the Klein government has obviously failed to do.

A close reading of the report shows that when you factor in inflation, Alberta spent $1,823 per person on health care in 2000-01 compared to the $1,728 it spent per person in 1992-93.

In other words, real health spending has gone up by about 5.5 per cent over eight years – hardly "spiraling out of control" as the government would have people believe. And spending on health certainly hasn’t "doubled" as Premier Klein has been quoted as saying several times.

The CIHI report also debunks the argument that health spending will soon account for more than half of the provincial budget.

According to CIHI, health spending in Alberta has remained fairly constant at between 30 and 35 percent of the provincial budget for the past ten years. There is no evidence that this proportion is likely to change – in fact, the CIHI report says that health spending is likely to fall to about 33 percent of the budget in 2001-02 from 35 percent in 2000-01.

Aside from the obvious mistakes that the Klein government has made in interpreting information from CIHI, it is also interesting to take a look at a number of figures from the report that the government has carefully refused to discuss – figures which, no matter how you try to bend them, cannot be used to support the argument that health spending is out of control.

For example, the report shows that over the past 20 years, Alberta has never spent more than 6 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, compared to the 6.5 to 8 percent spent by all other provinces.

These figures are significant for two reasons. First, because they show once again that spending is not out of control. And second because they show that we are not "living beyond our means." Who would argue that 6 percent of our provincial income is too much to pay for Medicare?

Another interesting finding from the report is that most of the growth in health spending in Alberta can be attributed to two factors: an increase in one-time spending for capital projects that were woefully neglected during the early years of the "Klein revolution"; and spending on drugs, which not incidentally is probably the most "privatized" part of the health system.

The bottom line in all of this is that the sky is not falling when it comes to health spending in Alberta.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about ways to improve the system or get more for our tax dollars. But if we’re going to have a debate, it should be based on the facts.

Unfortunately, given their actions to date, the Klein government seems more interested in whipping up hysteria in order to win support for privatization than looking at the real nature of the problem.