"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Mr. Norquist is a long time US'ian Republican operative going all the way back to the days when he helped Oliver North raised the funds to supply arms to the Contras.
Norquist is also the person most responsible for pushing the Republican mantra of tax cuts and austerity designed to shift government resources from the public to the private realm.
This is a doctrine that has spread throughout the Western world as a tsunami of so-called public-private partnerships in which the public takes on all the risk and private companies rake in all the profit, often with cronies standing just off stage as they fill their boots.
But what does that have to do with current day Saskatchewan?
Well, it turns out that the province has a real problem with surgical backlogs.
As you might expect, a lot of that is due to the shifting of resources away from elective surgeries, especially knee and hip replacements, during COVID times.
However, after getting to a really good place in 2015, backlogs in Saskatchewan have been increasing steadily since 2016:
Link
And what happened back then?
Well, in 2016 Premier Brad Wall signalled that huge cuts in government spending were coming before he unveiled a budget of extreme austerity in early 2017.
Mr. Wall promptly quit and Scott Moe became the premier that oversaw all the bathtub drowning to come.
So...
How does Mr. Moe plan to deal the backlog program that he and his helped generate over the last six years?
I think you already know the answer to
that one:Saskatchewan’s government plans to hire a private company to help clear a backlog of surgeries that ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ministry of Health confirmed it’s in talks with the Saskatchewan Health Authority on hiring a new third-party provider, days after Premier Scott Moe hinted the government wants to pay a private company to perform procedures such as hip and knee replacements for people on the long public waiting list...
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...Moe alluded to an “active” formal procurement offer for such a service. A government spokesman confirmed the government has actually yet to launch such a bid and said Moe was referring to a different, less-formal document. The Ministry of Health confirmed that a formal procurement offer is coming this summer...
{snip}
...The province already has an agreement with Calgary-based Surgical Centres Inc., which performs cataract, ear, nose, throat and other surgeries at facilities in Regina and Saskatoon. The SHA paid that company more than $10 million in 2021, according to public accounts.
The company has hired a consulting firm to lobby Saskatchewan’s government with a stated goal of “work(ing) with the Ministry of Health to assist in the surgical backlog.”
Kevin Doherty, a former Sask. Party cabinet minister who currently works for Prairie Sky Strategies in Alberta, registered as a lobbyist for SCI last Friday...
{snip}
...The government has indicated it’s interested in a dedicated private facility for orthopaedic surgeries like hip and knee replacements, which make up a disproportionate share of the more than 35,000 surgeries on the waiting list as of late April...
It's all there...Austerity that cripples the public system which justifies the need to go private aided by cronyism followed by a guaranteed market share for the favoured saviour(s) with little or no risk.
A sweet deal, indeed, for the chosen few that, in the end, is doomed to go sour for everyone else.
______The piece quoted from above is really an excellent one, with a sharp-eyed look at the issue from all angles, by Zak Vescera in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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