If you're waiting for surgery or a CT scan in Saskatchewan, congratulations are in order! A labour arbitrator just settled a dispute between the government and an angry union, and ruled in your favour.
The issue the arbitrator reviewed is whether or not the government can provide faster health care services to you by paying a licensed, private health clinic to perform them.
If you are like most patients, you simply want the service provided as soon as possible by someone qualified to provide it.
But you see young Skywalker, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) doesn't care about you or your knee pain, they're simply worried about losing their health care monopoly. On this issue, they truly are "the dark side."
The emergence of competition means that certain CUPE health employees can no longer rest on their laurels - suddenly there's pressure to provide a good service at a competitive cost. You can see why the union dislikes the idea of contracting out.
Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine going to work for years and never having to worry about losing your job due to someone coming along and providing a better service. Imagine receiving wage and benefit increases year after year regardless of what's happening in the private sector.
Who wouldn't want that?
However, the reality is, most taxpayers don't have lifelong job security, company pension plans and wages that go up regardless of their organization's performance.
In an attempt to protect their monopoly, CUPE asked the Labour Board to review the issue. You see, a clause in CUPE's contract requires the government to demonstrate savings before partnering with the private sector.
Part of the arbitration process required the arbitrator to put on an economist's hat and examine whether or not "marginal costs" should be considered versus "average costs." In plain English, it's the difference between merely looking at the added cost of hiring new staff and equipment to perform the service versus factoring in the total cost to the government which would include overhead expenditures.
Thankfully the arbitrator disagreed with CUPE's wishes to discontinue the partnership and ruled the government can continue to reduce wait times for patients by working with the private firms until 2013.
Also included in his decision were revised government figures that still show it's cheaper to partner with the private sector for knee and dental surgeries once all costs are considered. Estimates for CT scans were not released.
While we disagree with the arbitrator's decision to focus on marginal cost estimates versus numbers that reflect the total cost, allowing the contracts to continue until 2013 is a huge victory. After all, the government is planning on putting the services out for tender well before then - in March, 2011. The tender process will likely attract even more bidders to provide the service and that will ultimately reduce costs for taxpayers even further.
At the end of the day, Saskatchewan patients are receiving health services sooner than they did before the reform. As time passes, it will become clearer that this type of reform is also better for taxpayers' pocket book; despite what the "dark side" would have you believe.
Colin Craig, PrairieDirector
