Experience strongly suggests that the public will not benefit from the Klein government's proposal, and will likely suffer. The strongest evidence of this comes out of the United States, which has the largest for-profit health care sector in the world. The negative effects of market forces on health care are evident in other countries as well, ranging from Britain to Singapore. They are also clearly evident in Alberta in the case of cataract surgery, where studies have confirmed that the higher the concentration of services provided by for-profit clinics, the longer the waiting lists and the higher the patient costs. These effects are consistent with the principles of market economics.
Marketing is both necessary and expensive.
Processing the multitude of private insurance schemes requires four to five times the administrative resources needed with the universal plans of public system. Taxes on income and property must be paid, and expenses such as political contributions incurred. None of these are required of public health care providers. So it is not surprising that research consistently finds for-profit health care organizations more expensive and less efficient than their public counterparts. The Alberta government's spending on health care per capita, after adjusting for inflation, was virtually unchanged throughout the entire seven-year period that Don Getty was Premier.