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One week into New Brunswick’s provincial election campaign, the state of the province’s health care has emerged as a central issue – with the parties differing sharply on how serious the system’s problems have become and whether more funding should be provided issued to resolve this.
Jamie Gillies, a political scientist at St. Thomas University, told us Information morning Fredericton on Thursday that after this week’s leaders’ debate, it is clear that health care issues will be front and center for voters this year
“I think Susan Holt mainly wants to highlight the story of this election,” Gillies said. “Look at things like a health care system in crisis.”
During Wednesday’s debate, Progressive Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs was attacked by both Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Party Leader David Coon for pouring money into debt reduction over six years, which they said should have been used to improve basic health services.
“One of the reasons it is taking so long to improve primary care in this province is because we have a government that is unwilling to act and invest in healthcare and is very inflexible about the approach they take,” he said. Holt.
Higgs disputes this claim and continues to hold on to his long-held belief in the election that health care problems can be solved without spending a lot of money.
“No one ever says the government is running things as well as it could be,” Higgs said during the debate.
“Nobody ever says we couldn’t find better results in innovative solutions.”
The state of New Brunswick’s health care provided sparks during Wednesday’s CBC leadership debate and has emerged as the central issue on which opposition parties are focusing.
That’s a similar argument Higgs made in the 2018 election when he promised to halve wait times for knee and hip replacements in New Brunswick, through innovations like better operating room scheduling and redirecting existing hospital budgets “to focus on reducing waiting lists’. .”
It was a recipe that didn’t seem to have worked. Five years later, wait times for these procedures have gotten longer.
According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information, in 2018, 55 percent of hip replacement surgeries and 43 percent of knee replacements in New Brunswick occurred within the six-month national benchmark recommendations.
By 2023, those figures had fallen to 42 percent and 38 percent, respectively.
Other health care facilities have also deteriorated
This year, between January and June, provincial data shows that between 11 and 19 per cent of cancer patients ready for radiation therapy had to wait more than four weeks for treatment – depending on the month.
That is more than double the number of people who had to wait that long in any month in 2018.
And last December, a national report on healthcare wait times published by the Fraser Institute found that in 2023, when all procedures needed to correct a range of medical conditions were included, it took an average of 26.3 weeks for a patient in New Brunswick. to be treated after an appointment with a specialist.
That was double the national average and almost ten weeks more wait time than patients in New Brunswick in 2018.
For non-urgent psychiatric treatment, the average wait time in New Brunswick after a doctor’s referral has grown to 52 weeks, five times the national average.
Higgs does not dispute that problems exist in New Brunswick’s health care system, but is confident there are solutions that have not yet been implemented that can be deployed without incurring significant costs.
“We’re spending a billion dollars more a year on health care than we did four or five years ago,” Higgs said during the debate.
“There would be people who say you have to spend more money on health care and it will get better. And I will say we have to find a way to do health care better.”
National health care reports support the claim that health care spending has increased in New Brunswick.
The Canadian Institute of Health Information says government spending on the full range of health care services in the province increased by $983 million between 2018 and 2023.
However, this increase was the smallest in percentage terms of all ten provinces.
The average increase in healthcare expenditure between provinces has been a third higher since 2018. If New Brunswick’s funding increases had reached that average, it would have added another $344 million to provincial health care spending in 2023.
That, and the fact that New Brunswick has run budget surpluses for the past six years but opted to forgive $2.5 billion in provincial debt rather than further increase health care spending, is a central point of attack against Higgs by his opponents become.
Seven of the first thirteen planks released so far on the Liberal platform relate in some way to solving health care problems.
The party also has two new candidates who have clashed directly with Higgs on health care issues over the past six years.
That includes former PC MLA Bruce Northrup, who broke with Higgs in 2020 over an abandoned plan to reduce emergency services at smaller hospitals.
Also, the former head of New Brunswick’s English-language hospital system, Dr. John Dornan, is active. He was abruptly fired by Higgs in 2022 and subsequently won a $2 million wrongful dismissal judgment against the province.
The Green Party has also made health care a central issue in its campaign. It proposes an increase in funding of $1.5 billion over four years to shore up what it calls a “crumbling” system.
“We have a state of emergency in our health care system,” Coon said during the debate.
“It’s Code Orange. Everyone needs to get on deck and it will take a generational investment to solve the problem.”
Higgs calls these kinds of proposals a mistake that will put New Brunswick “in the red again.”
PCs have proposed their own $1.5 billion plan over four years to cut HST by two percentage points, but Higgs says this will be affordable by controlling government costs, including in health care.
The party has announced that a factory will spend an additional $25 million a year to improve access to doctors, nurses and others, but the party believes savings within the health care system can help pay for other improvements.
