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Paul Wells's avatar

The thing I learned from writing a 100,000-word book (that was the 2013 book, not the latest) is that you never come close to using all your material. The Alberta government is working on substantially increasing the amount of patient-level data, and aggregating all of that together, to get the kind of statistics some people are calling for here. I left that out because (a) it's in the future; I have no idea how effective it'll be (b) Already from here, that kind of effort looks like a Pandora's box of privacy concerns, so I'll wait until that fight happens before writing about it.

But I was cross with one reader who commented on another post about the lack of data in Alberta because, to me, this looked like a highly selective case of curiosity. I mean, holy jumpers, where's the reliable public information we can use to measure the success of any program in any field at any level of government in Canada? Are our ports in the right place? Is our rail system well deployed? How's it going with the 2 billion trees, and what's the name of the person who decided to throw in a few hundred million trees from a source that was previously excluded?

I had a prof who once said, if you want to destroy somebody's argument, check their footnotes. I've used that advice a hundred times. But if you're going to insist on data in one province for one policy area, you're going to need to show me where you've demanded it elsewhere.

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Darcy Hickson's avatar

The intellectual clash between Mr. Smith and Dr. Larson is interesting. I sense that Dr. Larson feels disrespected and her ideas on appropriate care are getting trashed by what she sees as an interloper from the political branch of health care that doesn’t know much.

Fair enough, but these tensions are healthy, in my opinion. Dr. Larson has to understand that a publicly funded healthcare system is going to have political priorities that take into account what public expectations are. In many jurisdictions, the public is not happy with the status quo and this is going to test the mettle of healthcare providers who are trying hard to keep people alive but not appreciated for their efforts.

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