When cash is short, somebody must choose

When cash is short, somebody must choose
Calgary Herald
April 10, 2009 2:05 AM

W hen cuts must be made to health-care budgets, it's inevitable
someone won't be happy. There's no way to cut back without treading on
someone's turf or personal area of interest, and so it is with the
provincial government's announcement that it will no longer provide
financial assistance of $200 annually per chiropractic patient or fund
sex-change surgery. The cuts to chiropractic will save a sizable chunk
of $53 million in the $13 billion budget, while dropping sex-change
surgery will save about$700,000.Granted, the latter decision affects
only about 20 Albertans a year, but that$700,000 can certainly be put
to use in a broader health-care category in which more people can be
aided by the money.

Certainly, chiropractic care is something a large number of Albertans
turn to, but as Health Minister Ron Liepert succinctly noted:"Some
tough choices have to be made."

The priorities scream from the headlines almost every week: long
emergency room wait times, shortages of doctors, nurses and other
health-care professionals, lack of long-term care beds which causes a
chain reaction bed shortage all the way down the line to ERs, funding
of orphan drugs, expensive new cancer treatments -- and the need to
keep up with costly new medical technology as well. Chiropractic care
and transgender operations are simply much further down the funding
priority list, and that is as it should be.

Something has to give some-where, and neither of those two categories
involves life-and-death medical issues. Liepert can expect flak for
his decision, but he would have rightly been targeted for a very
serious barrage of outrage had he delisted something much higher up on
the priority list.

Advocates for transgender people say the surgery they seek is
medically necessary. Some people would argue quite reasonably that it
is elective surgery, since it is not essential to saving the patient's
life the way a cardiac bypass or an appendectomy are, but rather is an
operation one makes a conscious decision to have after years of
therapy and going through a screening process.

Tough times do call for tough decisions, and the provincial government
has made wise ones in this instance. The public is quick to pounce
when Liepert's ministry makes poor choices-- and there have been no
shortage of those--but when they do the right thing, they should be
applauded for it.

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